


sunflower

by ruruka



Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Death Note, M/M, but like........probably different than the 10000 other fics of this au. i would hope.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-10-05 04:15:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 34,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17317916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruruka/pseuds/ruruka
Summary: yagami light meets the world's greatest detective, and he hasn't slept quite right since.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> a lot of elements in this were developed by my [boyfriend](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonosuke) who permitted me to put it all together into a cohesive story.

For an early Christmas gift, because this December has proven so chilled, he receives a cream colored pea coat, single breasted with neat lapels and a pocket on either hip. He wears it three days later, over khaki slacks and a thin black sweater he’s liked a while, to better his defenses against winds carrying snow down the narrow gelid sidewalks.

The train whistles a while behind him. Hardly do others brave this evening, alone all around him in normally brim-taut precincts. Snow hadn’t been predicted on the local stations until tomorrow morning. Stepping into the night once cram school has let out had found the asphalt wet already with fresh winter, and his father’s for certain not home to call for a ride back with the hours he’s been putting in lately. Another unknown criminal weaving away from the inevitable clench of justice. The bastard will be caught in no time, he’s certain, though for now can only pick his independent way through shaded city streets as the storm brews thicker upon his shoulders. He quite likes his new coat.

Within several paces more, he flicks down to check his watch. It’s past seven now, nearing eight, tucking a tress behind one ear as he glances back up for the path ahead. But briefly does it last- he’s not the derelict with the split second span for attention, but now do his pupils pivot long across the way toward newfound blur. Something’s moved, fallen. His steps pause at his demand. An alleyway alerts him to glance upon it. He’d be stupid to rush so recklessly toward whatever it is that’s caught his eye, and he thinks he may just be stupid to have stopped at all for the chance to see a maple leaf carried down in the breeze. Maple leaves don’t _thud_ in such a fashion, though, the last he’d known. They aren’t dark and heavy and descend from the plain skyline, either, if he’s got enough intellect to deduce patterns in normalcy. If his father were with him now, he’d consider any and all possibilities, analyze the situation until it disintegrated to pure sand through the fingers. It could have been nothing, but he’s alone on a busy street in a building blizzard three weeks before Christmas, it’s cold and it’s dark and it’s quiet, so it could have been something, too.

His shadow crawls behind his slinking shoulders.

To the left side trail, a grocer’s market stands humble and fair, the little place his mother stops in some afternoons when their pear shipments first arrive. The midway between it and the next door magazine parlor is an alleyway, _the_ alleyway he now trespasses within, slow and cautious to fall as caramel in this cold. After several sets of his crunching steps, he’s stolen again to stop himself silent at the glimpse of cacophony. The sidelong dumpsters, where that first _thud_ had landed, raises a messy din that drags a talon up the lengths of his pulse. He swallows, breathes thickly in through the nose, steps another bout forward. The noises stop. His movement stops. The noises rumble up again, metallic, scrambling. He darts forward without rue. “Hey, whoever is in there- come out, now!”

Either arm spreads out at his sides, legs angled too to double his span, teeth grit tight against the night and snow licking the warmth of his hair and shoulders. Breathing meets him in gruff pulls.

The top edge of the trash bin closest to him rattles with motion. He licks across his top lip, and does not tremble. From that same bin, darkness rises slowly, crawling as though an imp cascading from molten underground. A head pops up after two clawing hands. He won’t admit how deeply he’s gasped. Not ever, because it is a fool’s clench to take such terror toward the presence of a scraggly little cat.

He relaxes his muscles back to himself, though does not dismiss the alarm altogether. The cat calls out to him in a deep, menacing scratch of a _nyaaaaa_ before pulling itself up to hop out onto the wet ground. He’s skinny, the pathetic little thing, far too much so for health’s hope. Ribs poke from beneath his patches of dark fur. The cat limps over toward him, yet behaves with the spectacular amiability unlike a feral stray by rubbing his head along the shins of neat khaki slacks.

Dirt marks mar the fabric where the animal has touched. Overhead, he tautens his expression to an almost sneer.

“...You don’t have a home, do you?” Again, the cat growls some sort of greeting cry, to which he flinches a moment but settles back proper. A chip’s missing from his left ear point, skin of the upper lip battered enough to expose rows of his teeth out freely. It’s a concerning sight to him, would be more so were the cat not so... _painful_ upon his eyes. He grimaces as he examines the stranger closer now, held up in his gloved palms to study. His hind legs kick against the open air beneath them. To brilliant surprise, a collar pokes from the remaining fur around the cat’s neck; he glances over the skull shaped silver pendant hooked to it. “ _Ryuk_ , huh… I guess it’ll get pretty cold out here tonight, won’t it? Hm.”

He ends the cat’s struggle by bundling him up against his chest within one flap of his coat. Soot streaks the clean cream lining of the interior. Frowning, he peers upwards to pinpoint the higher windows on each side of the center alley, though finds only those upon the front side buildings. No one could have possibly thrown him from one of those to fall directly straight for the side alley, leaving the only probability being dropped off of a rooftop above. Judging on looks, it might not be too far off a chance.

The storm battles him all the way to the residential terraces of his neighborhood. He kicks his shoes against the outside step, places them to dry just inside the door and shakes his hair of its snowmelt dampness all whilst keeping one arm cradled to the bundle beneath his jacket. He’d been careful to keep quiet enough as to not announce his arrival back home, opting rather to leave the front door ajar _just_ enough, traipsing silently to up the stairs to his room, set his bag, hang his coat, flip a book open upon his desk, ease the warmth away from his chest to the floor below. The cat shakes himself better awake, staring forth with inquisitive yellow eyes too wide for their sockets as he paws his lopsided way out the open door of the bedroom. It closes swiftly shut behind him. The desk chair accepts him kindly.

And not but a two minute’s half: “Oh my, God! What are you doing in here?! _Mom! Come here, quick!”_

“Sayu?” he hears call muffled down the hallway. The patter of his mother’s feet take haste after it, past his doorway which opens just in time to step out into the hall light and catch up to her pounce down the staircase.

Kitchen tile taking his feet, he breathes out in perfect craft, “What’s going on?”

On that same floor crouches his sister, on her haunches, arm stretched out before her with a squirming black bundle at the ends. “Look, Light! A cat! _AH!_ Isn’t she just _sooo_ cute?!”

The feline writhes harder to protest the title. From aside him, their mother pads over to her and the house guest with question scrawled through her eyes. “How did it get in the house? You weren’t outside in this weather, were you, Sayu?”

The sudden now, she tilts up toward the archway to watch the front door rattle just a slight fraction in a coming breeze. Amber eyes widen before he nods forward. “Oh, I must have left the door open when I came home from class. Sorry, I didn’t even notice that.”

Pursing her mouth, Sachiko moves to latch it whilst his focus falls to his sister’s rise with the cat in tow, cradled in her arms like a newborn. Were that the true case, he thinks he’d ask the hospital for store credit. He shakes the thought. Sayu scritches the underside of Ryuk’s ugly chin.

“He looks sick, honey, maybe you shouldn’t touch him so much,” offers their mother’s concern on her return back with them. “Let’s wait until your father gets home. He has a collar on, doesn’t he? Dad will find his owners.”

“But what if he doesn’t? We can’t just leave the poor kitty out in a snowstorm all night…” The cat is lifted up beneath the arms to face Sachiko straight on, Sayu pleading out, “Come on, look how cute he is! We have to let him stay here a little bit!”

Light watches their mother’s face twitch with the strain of not contorting into full revolt. Ryuk sputters out a rusty cough. “Ah...he’s very nice, Sayu, it’s just that...we can’t keep him if he already has a home.”

“I don’t think it would be so bad to let him stay the night. At least, until the snow blows over,” he suggests in time to quell his sister’s forming pout. When his mother glances to him, he attempts a smile, halfway, as one would shrug _hey, why not, right?_ for her to collect. Sighing the shortest bit, Sachiko cannot help a wary little simper as she concedes, “Alright, just until we can find his family. We’d ought to take him to the vet, though. I’ve never seen a cat look so...like that.”

Ryuk trains his gummy sort of grinning look toward her, tilting his ears to the left ever slight.

Cheers bloom from the youngest Yagami. “I’m so glad he won’t be out there all alone in the cold. I’ve always wanted a cat. And this one’s so sweet, I can tell.” Cradling him again with one arm, Sayu reaches to read off the engravement on his collar. “Ryuk, that’s a funny name, it’s all spelled out in katakana and everything. It almost sounds like Ryūga, though- how cute!”

Sachiko looks on fondly, contentment blossomed enough for him to slip back up with an excuse that he’s got homework still to finish up, an escape plan always without fail. His bedroom door closes with a quiet latch, and he lands heavily into his desk chair with tire yet wastes not a moment in dropping his fingers to the keyboard.

A browser tab opens.

_Missing cat kanto._

Thousands of results. Only the few recent enough to matter are scanned through. Not a familiar photograph among any, so he tries another search on a smaller scale, _missing cat_ _tokyo, missing pet tokyo, missing tokyo,_ until he’s concluded no heartbroken damsel has posted about her runaway, therefore relinquishing him into the free world, as far as Light sees it. He’d guess that happened long ago. He’d guess he’s gone crazy for caring so much about the life of a foul smelling stray tabby, but he’s wrung his heart and soul into lesser causes before.

And higher causes as well, he thinks, proven tenfold in the coming sunshine of the new day where he’s in his window seat for classtime soaking it all in upon his gilded flesh, eyelashes padding as he listens in on a lecture he could teach twice as well himself, scrawling notes despite it to keep himself grounded. (f(x)∙g(x))' = f'(x)g(x) + f(x)g'(x). Easy. Twelve days left of his high school career. Even easier.

During the next break period, the point between calculus and English instructors swapping positions, he finds himself eager with fatigue to peer across the outside campus through the gleaming window glass. The snow has relented, though not departed enough to cut his commute this morning any slack. White blankets across the grass outside, only just now beginning to drip away beneath the blaze of morning sun. Grass raises its fingertips out in a myriad of randomized patches around the courtyard. It reminds him not of this season but rather another coming soon, the time of new life to decorate the world in its glory. That’s what he likes, the rebirth of life and light, yet too often does he find himself falling lately into forgetting such kind positives and recalling only the haunt. He doesn’t like to associate nighttime with higher crime or winter with more difficult body hiding, but such must be of a policeman’s child. He thinks of Christmas, and he thinks of his father coming home with his hat in a hand to say that someone’s just admitted to killing their wife with the shortcake knife last year; last White Day, it’d been a poisoning of thirteen party guests; he thinks of springtime, the rebirth of life and light, and he thinks of the case taken on six months ago by his father’s task force, one of which the only details he’s been allowed to hear thus far entail a robbery turned double murder, a suspect not even yet suspected, a devastated little girl with no parents any longer. Light had cursed the ground that heathen walks on, clenched his fist to any who dare defile the name of equity, and gone back to studying for his entrance exams.

Betwixt it, though, he’ll close his textbooks every so often to flick his bored eyes along his page of personal notes, just to be certain he’s run through every detail his father and tabloid news sites have leaked and connected them as well as possible. His textbook opens again to cover the penmanship, and Yagami Light returns to his normal student life.

“Light! Dinner, please come down!”

And his normal faultless son and upcoming heir incapable of wrongdoing life.

The desk chair scrapes to the flooring. He’s up in a straighten of his back, his tie, his attitude to trail out into the hall’s bulb light. Four paws tap along behind his descent to the first floor.

“Smells great, Mom.” Sachiko pats his cheek on one stroll past toward the stovetop again, his smile turning toward Sayu’s crouch in front of the television screen with her fists clenched to watch the drama unfold. Light glances away again the second the handsome blond on screen dips the pretty heroine into a kiss, and claims the same color of surprise as the actress to spot another perched at the dining table. “Dad, you’re home.”

Nodding once, Souichirou’s expression reads a certain sort of relief unlike his usual steel stress of heart, sipping black tea as his son breaks into a wider clasp of mirth.

“I made him come home early once he mentioned nothing much was happening. Leave the slow nights to that new rookie, I say,” bubbles Sachiko, setting a platter of sticky rice in the table’s center. A turn of her head says, “Sayu, put Ryukie down and come eat, please.”

With a place of the cat, of whom Light hadn’t even noticed tagged along his ankles, to the couch cushion, socked feet race across to take a seat at the table, the elder sibling following to sit aside her. It isn’t long until he feels the scraggly fur of a tail smoothing against his shins, and he’d be much more apt to nudge him away had it not been for the powerwash and worm pill from the veterinarian a week prior. His collar tag jingles against Sachiko’s ankles as ping pong eyes study her ladling of meat into four bowls. Light could swear he _hears_ the cat’s drool pooling on the kitchen tile. A shake of the head frees him from distraction. “So, slow night, really? Does that mean you solved the arson case?”

Souichirou tells no truths in his steel eyes. “Light, you know I’m not allowed to disclose that unless we’re absolutely certain. But...Aizawa is handling most of what’s left.”

A nod drops to hide his forming smirk. Of course his father’s team is untouchable. Always. Light clears his throat, and decides to tickle a thought now that he’s the chance with his father here. “Hey, what ever happened with the larceny, from back in May- the one that turned into a double murder?”

Expression tight still, Souichirou begins off another stern, “ _Light-”_ before interruption calls.

“I know, I know, you aren’t supposed to tell me much,” accepts his son. A breath turns his shoulders solid. “But, as far as I’ve heard it’s still an open case. I did some searching on my own, and figured out the victims were in the Amane family, so their daughter must be that famous model, right? And she’s bound to have had stalkers or crazy fans that would do anything to get close to her. There was recently an incident with her and this man, Yukida Tsutomu, I think you should investigate him and-”

“Come on, now, you two.” Bowls clink to the dining table top. “No more talk of murderers or stalkers at the dinner table. Your father is supposed to be home early to _relax_.”

Though internally, he chokes upon what must be said, Lights bows into a venerating nod. “Sorry, Mom. Let’s, ah, talk about something else.”

“You know, you could be onto something, Light,” murmurs from across the table. Souichirou’s hands are steepled before his mouth as he speaks. “Amane… I’m not sure how you found that out, but that’s true, it was a family by that name. And if they really do have a famous model for a daughter-”

“Souichirou, _please_.”

He looks to her in time to press his glasses back up his bridge. Into a cleared cough, “Your mother is right. Let’s just eat.” His spoon lifts in one hand whilst he ventures, “Sayu, how has your ikebana club been going?”

“Great!” she chimes on an instant. Chopsticks pine for a clump of rice. “It’s gotten a little slow since it started getting cold, but we’re painting these really pretty sakura scrolls to welcome next year’s class-”

They’ve all four settled into their seats now, Sachiko still in the midst of smoothing her skirt when the interruption arises; rather, magnetizes all focuses to beneath the table, where hacking stirs up boldly. Light sneers, pulling his feet up away from the oncoming mess of regurgitated apple seeds and clumps of black fur.

“...Didn’t you say that cat had an owner?” mutters their father, spoon dropping back into his bowl, fingers massaging the tension beneath his glasses.

Another weekend passes scornless.

Yagami Light carries out his final traces of high school life as planned (perfectly), note taking and test passing, impressing his teachers, outdoing his peers. Normal life. Regular life. Usual life. He’s close to signing off a one way trip to the middle of the world just to switch up his routine, but he decides that with entrance exams in two weeks, he needn’t do anything brash. Yet.

Snow begins to kiss the earth again on his walk home after Tuesday classes. Soft flurries that spiral down with still enough edges between to see where he’s going. He’s got a nice vermilion scarf round his shoulders today, a European brand and baby soft, sent in the mail for the holidays from relatives he hardly recalls. Sayu had received a sterling bracelet price tagged so glamorous she proclaimed herself to feel like a red carpet starlet. He picks bits of cat hair from the fibers of his own gift as he walks.

Something pets the insides of his guts in such a fashion that he goes numb down the front. And still, he keeps walking, knows where to place his feet even if they lose all sensation, very practically calculates the indents in the sidewalk his shoes wear upon twice daily. Something squeezes him so hard his tongue could loll, yet never once does he forget his moves. It’s a dance, this practiced rhythm of life. A ballroom waltz, only no one’s ever asked him what he thinks of the tango.

Perhaps he’s being a tad dramatic.

Perhaps his mind will soon melt out of his ear canals.

But- and, oh, they plug right quick to a saving grace -he shakes himself of the weather once he’s clicked inside, glancing around before making toward the staircase. One step halts him. “Oh, Light, you’re home.”

Over one shoulder, he looks to find his mother, her hands clasped, her eyes kind, to which he offers a nodded smile and would build up afternoon greeting were it not for her beckoning bid, “Light, your father’s been waiting for you. Come, come.”

Hands grip his bag strap. “Dad?” But she’s already swept off from the entryway toward the kitchen, Light following behind her with tempered timing.

Once broken from route to destination, he blinks up to his father’s form beside the kitchen window, facing away from him with hands tucked behind the back. Leering about, his mother has vanished, no sisters or cats around to distract with their vexations either. Just Yagami senior and his heir, in the kitchen, in the middle of time.

“Light,” makes his posture straighten. And by God, he’s no suck up or kiss ass or prude, merely a good boy raised by a good father who’d taught him the alarmingly delectable consequences to politeness. When it is that that good father turns opposite, the look on his face startles Light into confusion. “My son, you’ve done amazingly.”

“Huh?” It’s a brief gasp only, watching his father beam before the setting winter sun through the window panes. Then, he shakes himself clean. “Oh, you must have seen the results of the practice exam. Yeah, I was the top scorer. I guess that is pretty ama-”

“No, no! It’s bigger than that,” Souichirou lauds, composing himself to award further, “Your thoughts on the Amane case were just what we needed to hear. You were correct, Light. Mogi and Ukita were able to locate the suspect you named and get a confession out of him. You did it, Light! You solved it!” A reach branches out toward him, ends with a rest of a hand on his shoulder, firm, tender, the softening of his voice and look. “I couldn’t be more proud of you.”

“Dad…” His eyes shine with the afternoon light. His chin lifts higher, satisfaction grasping his heart. Of course he knew it. He’s Yagami Light. “I’m glad I could help. This is all I want to do with my life- rid the world of crime and teach everyone the true meaning of justice.”

Souichirou nods so solidly. His arms return back to himself, though he does not calm on instant. “Light, I should also let you know this… The Japanese police force has been in close contact recently with a very elite detective. He took an interest in a case several months ago about a missing family in Saitama. He solved it in two weeks, but has remained as a confidante to our task force ever since.” Light listens on with a nod. Souichirou furthers, “The point to this all is the most honorable part. Because of your guidance with this case, this detective has taken a particular interest in _you,_ Light.”

Up the slightest go his brows, meandering in contemplation the moment the news has hit him. An elite detective has his eye on him. That could prove interesting in a dozen different twists, most prominent being he’ll have to pay close focus to every one of his own moves should he and this elite mind ever cross paths. Holding a coffee mug the wrong way could alert suspicion on him, if this detective is anything like the typical storybook Sherlock.

“His name and appearance are unknown. In fact, most everything about him is a mystery to us still. But he goes by the alias L, or at times, Ryuichi. Without a doubt in my mind, he is the best detective in the world.”

The skin down his arms tingles with raindrop pricks. His stare trains tightly toward his father and the certainty in his eyes. “Why would the greatest detective in the world be interested in one random case in the middle of Japan? It doesn’t make any sense… And to be interested in me, too, all because I helped out with something?” _What’s this guy’s real story?_

Souichirou allows his lids to perch shut a quiet while. “I understand. But he’s asked me to arrange a meeting between the two of you, something we at the police force have not even had the opportunity for. You’ll agree, won’t you?”

His left pocket is a warm bed for within his hand to twitch, clench. L. It draws heat all down his neck to think on it, this situation that’s chaining him so suddenly. He’d be a fool to accept, and a fool to decline, an all around idiot who’d refused the chance to get the answers himself to all of his wonderings. L.

Shortly, Light’s head bobs into a nod. His father gleams in muted vigor.

“Excellent, I’ll tell Watari tomorrow.” He hasn’t the chance to question just what that’s got to mean before Souichirou is nodding him along back toward his trailed entrance. “Don’t let this distract you from your studies, though. To-Oh’s entrance exams are soon. I believe in your capabilities, Light. L must see that same potential as well.”

He smiles if only for the excitement he can smell simmering in his father’s heart. The catalyst of the topic at hand drifts Light back up to the confines of his room, door shut, locked, behind him, coat hung bag set sigh lost. Palms rub up over his eyes. A warm vibration rumbles, a bike with no muffler, from the round black lump curled to sleep on his bed. Hair is shed all across his top sheet. Another sigh, sits himself to his desk chair, forgets what focus burns like.

The coming weeks sever cervical from thoracic.


	2. Chapter 2

High school sends him off into the world with a slap and a swear, at that the best prepared to face life now of all his graduating class. His parents drown him in new stationary beneath the tree, his mother proclaiming in sweet feigned surprise that Santa must be excited for him to start college in the spring. The new year flicks onto his wrist within another week, a flash a blink a whistle so quick, all the same stuffed in his bedroom running along his rat wheel day and night and night and day. Sayu whines every so often that she doesn’t ever get to play with Ryuk since he’s always kept up in his room, to which her brother will respond plainly, _take him,_ and still come back from a bathroom trip to find ten pounds of fur and teeth rattling snores atop his mattress. And that cat, too- if he finds one more mess of applesauce vomited up beside his favorite dress shoes, he thinks he’ll have to purchase a one way feline train pass. Still it isn’t the issue, not Ryuk or the Christmas gifts or the time that doesn’t pass while all the same dripping along ten minutes a moment. The issue’s that his father’s missed dinner six days out of the week, which means next year, when he thinks of the new year, he’ll think of the string of murders occurring one by one by one over the course of the past week and counting. He’ll think of the revulsion in the back of throat.

It seems something different bothers him every new day. A pen dying off in the middle of note taking shouldn’t turn his face the color of such smolder. He shouldn’t want to throttle whoever left two sips in the milk carton. But it all stays within him. As long as Chief Yagami and his team are out there, it can all stay within him.

And then it’s seventeen days into the beautiful new year, and his stare burns against the metallic edge of the pencil on the desk.

He’d been cheered off by his mother and sister this morning, censured by the university monitor for arriving ten minutes before the test (too early, he knows), and felt the need for scoffing at the hundreds of pencils flying into the air the same second the supervisor had told them to begin. If they were truly prepared, they wouldn’t be so frantic to wring out every last second of allotted time. Chin in one hand, he peruses the test booklet with tired eyes. Another trial of his skills- and far from a thrilling one. Regardless it’s in his best interest to begin, and he’s just reaching for his pencil as the supervisor is clacking past in slow beats of steps. The unexpected catches him. “Student number one six two. Sit properly in your chair.”

At the very least, it’s something to start him off on this exam with some amusement. Gradually, he turns of himself that he can backward without raising suspicions of furtive cheating. The exam supervisor’s voice had sounded from three rows behind, where Light now swivels to glance, and to pinch his face up into hard astonishment. Whoever owns the title of student one six two has well earned the chiding remark; between torso and table have wedged the stranger’s bent up knees, feet bare atop the chair’s seat. He’s shown up to the entrance exams at such a prestigious school in jeans and tee shirt, barefoot, hair unkempt, expression of someone who hasn’t slept an hour in the last hundred, and now he’s got the gall to sit like some sort of toad biding his time upon a forest log. Light could laugh, though is rather too taken in unnerve by the stranger’s cutting stare. Blank, relentless. He feels strangled by the mere notion of sharing a presence with this person. He blinks, turning back to his test after what must be a millennium of gasping for air beneath that look.

Focus is forced to train upon his task. Briefly, he listens in upon the muffled battle carried out three rows behind him, catching whispers of _need to sit like this, forty percent,_ before minutes push forward the supervisor into a disgruntled walk back forward for the desk at the room’s front. Light shakes an exhale out below his breath, determined to carry on untouched and finish his exam pristinely.

Still...the gall of that guy.

And to show up, three months post, to such a prestigious school’s entrance ceremony in jeans and a tee shirt, feet rathered bare than the dirt of these running shoes, hair unkempt, expression of someone who hasn’t slept an hour in the last thousand, and have the gall to earn the same top top top score as himself on the exams- well it almost makes Light wish he could be sick to his stomach right here and now. But that would be pitiful. Nothing of a To-Oh freshman class representative.

He stands proud and mighty and addresses the class with the speech he’s worked on since before he’d been told he would give it, the other hunched over the podium beside him with a grip atop his blank sheet of paper as he spews out some half baked form of an oration. Light doesn’t hate him, but the _peculiarity_ of his every last detail drives him just a bit wild. His appearance his posture his evident intelligence the smell of pastry cream on his breath as he speaks off his address beside him- nothing seems to fit together about this person to create a coherent being, not a puzzle at all but a full out explosion pieced back together by the blind and had the name Ryūga Hideki slapped upon it.

Applause rains suddenly on their shoulders, and it is only then that Light realizes their time is up. Catching motion and mind up to reality, he bows forward, Ryūga staying in his limp crouch forward before lurking forward off the stage to return to the seats in the front row. Light keeps his focus trained forward. Ryūga hadn’t taken any initiative to spark a conversation the whole first half of sitting together, though that does not dismiss the gaze he can _feel_ searing his flesh raw. Dirtied white sneakers rest on the floor. Ryūga clutches his knees against himself, staring, staring. Eyes shut, Light throbs in discomfort, not so much alleviated by the spin of words from his mouth.

“You’re Yagami Light,” melts against his ear. He flinches back the most unnoticeable fraction. Ryūga’s hushed voice creeps onward. “Son of Yagami Souichirou of the Japanese police force. You intend to join the police academy after graduation, and you’ve assisted on some cases before, so you have experience.”

If he had the choice, he’d stand and move his seat a dozen rows over. He’s only so uneasy top to bottom with this scrutiny dangling over him. Glancing in a peripheral, Ryūga’s chewing his lower lip inside, eyes never once blinking as he leers dark murk directly at him still. Focusing back forward, Light is firm in his decision of ignorance, until he hears a dry breath in, and the other murmurs out, “I’d like to invite you to work with the police force on the latest case of murders around the Kanto region.”

Light’s eyes thin with dubiety. “Invite me?” His voice is low as to not alert those around watching the ceremony continue up on stage. “What are you saying? Do you mean that you’re part of the police force?”

Were a list written off of who in this room is likely to hold an authority, Ryūga Hideki in his baggy jeans and feathered mess for a haircut would have been printed at the absolute bottom spot.

And yet, he claims the very top.

“I want to tell you,” says calmly his feverish gaze. Light continues to watch from the corner of an eye, though swallows back his rippling prostration to what next spills. _“I’m L.”_

For a split twice second, Light feels his body overcome with the stillness of shock. Like a faucet drips his life back within him, blinking one note before he’s faultless again. The presence of the persona known as _L_ hadn’t invaded his mind in months, not since the week or so surrounding his father’s mention of the interest in him. He’s a faded memory now, plowed over by holidays and studying and cat puke on his shoes. There’d been nights where he’d sat at his desk, dark all outside the honey gold tent beneath his lamp, face in one hand just to rest and to think of what the hell the best sleuth this world has known wants to do with him. Then he’d sat right, and gone back to his work, and gone to sleep, and woken up, and played piano with Sayu on the bench beside him hoping to learn her own chords, and he’d spent half an hour or so elsewhere with his focus on the television news, scanning over the local atrocities, and he’d had dinner with his mother and sister and sliced up an apple for the cat that was only supposed to spend one cold night there, and weaved all throughout he’d studied and worked and thought of future heavens; in January, he’d been up an extra twenty minutes laughing to himself over the goblin three rows behind him, and in February, he’d turned eighteen years old, and his cake was castella with powdered sugar on top, and he’d gone to sleep, and he’d woken up, and he’d met the greatest detective in the world who looks like nothing more than an exhausted college student who could really use a trip to the tailor.

_I’m L._

He’s nothing but a liar.

“You’re L? The one my father told me wanted to meet me last year?” His fingers clench a short notch on his thighs. He matches his stare now, untested. Ryūga traces his lips with a thumbnail.

“You are under no obligation to believe me,” he mumbles. “If you’d like, I could have your father confirm it for you. I’ve allowed the task force to meet with me in person since this recent string of murders began. The Muda case. I’m sure you’re familiar with it.”

“Yeah,” Light breathes. Seventeen murders in the past four months, of course he’s familiar with it. He can hardly ever get away from the news coverage.

Beside him, Ryūga hardly acts as if he’s so _interested_ as has been told, but his words do reveal certain hints in their soft slurring. “The Amane case was quite something. I’d been waiting for the police force to draw that conclusion for months, and from what I’ve heard, you came up with it over dinner conversation. How odd.”

“You were waiting for them to come up with it? Does that mean…” Light’s brows pinch inward. The mention of that case has eased him into accepting the truth has been held, this man drawling to him now could certainly be the real L, yet something still restrains him from a rush forward to admiration.

“Of course. She may not use her surname in public, but it isn’t hard to uncover Misa Misa’s true identity.” Ryūga’s- _L’s...._ L’s hands move to grasp upon the frontmost fabric of his pants, condensing forward even further upon himself. “I’m impressed with your abilities nonetheless. As I said, I’d like you to work more closely on the Muda case with us. I assume you’ve got your own details thought out already. The task force could use deduction skills like yours, Yagami Light.”

Their gaze does not fall away from the one form its woven into. Light looks to him, breathing, existing, keeps his demeanor steady all the way into the microphone feedback drop. The crowd around them erupts into applause, Light catching up to mimic it and watch the university headmaster step away from the podium. Students begin to rise and carry themselves off the same, uniform as any sea of sheltered geniuses will behave. Light stands. Light walks. A shadow lingers behind him.

“Think about this conversation,” L says to him once they’re out in the afternoon light. He doesn’t have the chance to nod before the other’s limbering off for the long black car parked just beside them. A limousine. Light’s mouth balks. “I’m sure I’ll be seeing you around campus.”

“Uh-ah- okay.” He damns himself for the sputtering that he moves to recover from in nodding. The car door is clicked shut by a tall suited man, and that’s the last he sees then of Ryūga Hideki, the world’s greatest detective.

The emptiness doesn’t last long.

“So...Muda, huh.” Brisk breezes shudder by every so often this warm morning. He keeps his bag shouldered firmly as they walk the pathway down left, sakura pink flooded all across, shade of their trees blanketing him in a handsome shadow. “That’s an interesting codename for a criminal. It shows that whoever he is, he’s useless to this world, a total waste of space in society.”

“I suppose,” L mumbles back, scratching the sun-warmed top of his hair as they enter toward the open court asphalt. “The public named him. He’s amassed some kind of fan club among internet circles. I believe the name comes from the English word, _murder._ ”

Light stumbles over himself, smooth in the rigidity that finds him to mend it. Sounding vapid isn’t a priority of his. And likewise, the transition from Japanese to English had come so seamlessly to L, easy and unaccented. Light supposes that he must be a foreigner, closer inspection to his facial structure confirming so. No native’s got a nose like that. Light drops his bag to a nearby bench.

“I’m surprised, Ryūga,” he says, utilizing the alias he’s demanded stay put for publicity’s sake, “I didn’t expect you to suggest tennis as a way to get to know each other.”

_Game, set, match._

Light stands solid in his one knee bent forward, arms clutching his racket out to the opposite side. He breathes in heavy tumbles. His expression reads pure intensity. Then, all at once, he’s upright again, racket hanging to one side, pressure damp forehead cleaned with one swipe of a forearm. And he...smiles. “You sure don’t mess around. That was one of the toughest matches I’ve played since actual competitions.”

“Yes,” L says, face unchanged, pale and placid as before. He drops his gear back to the bench once they’ve approached it and continued back for the exit. The crowd around them cheers Light on as he passes to leave, certainly not mending the sore loss L’s just suffered, he thinks, though can’t help himself from smirking.

“So, about your offer.” A cup of cold brew taps to the table. They’ve meandered toward a diner not far from the courts upon Light’s own insistence to get a drink together and talk some things over- an interrogation session a detective cannot refuse, he’s sure. He keeps his hands to his lap, even. “I talked it over with my father, and his description of you matched exactly to what you look like, so I don’t doubt that you are who you say you are.”

L, stirring a sixth creamer shot into his coffee, says dully, “Oh? You talk about me to your father?”

“N...No, not really,” Light laughs off just to avoid the maladroit implications. “Just, his description of a tall thin guy with lots of hair and doesn’t wear shoes couldn’t really be overlooked. I’m certain you really are L.”

“Alright,” he says into the rim of his mug. “Then, you’ll be willing to undergo a test of your deduction capabilities for me, won’t you? Feel free to say no.”

 _Well, when you word it that way-_ A nod finds him quickly. “Sure, I’d be okay with that. Just don’t forget that I was the one who wanted to ask _you_ questions, alright?”

L hums something half interested as he leans back to dig within his pockets. Glancing his way, Light spies the white interior of one be pulled out, crumbs raining out with it, left hanging that way to instead search the second pocket. “I have with me three letters, all of which were written by who we believe to be the culprit in the Muda case.”

Deep amber widens. He isn’t sure just how L can call himself a detective and share such confidential evidence with a civilian- his father slips up every now and then, but never would he come home and lay a severed hand on the dinner table. Bits of annoyance trace up Light’s skin, yet he must admit, it’s rather amazing to be able to see this sort of thing up close. If this is what it’ll be like to be working first hand with task force, he’d plead to delve right in. Once explained that he’d like to know what information Light can summon from them, he nods right into the work. The first letter details certain agonies plaguing mankind, the second continuing on to beg the Gods for mercy in the author’s despicable life. “These sound more like suicide notes than letters from a murderer…” He flips through the notes a while longer. There must be _something_ hidden within them that he’s to pick out here, the key to this test L has laid out. Reading over the first again, his vision swims just enough to click his mind into acuity. “Oh, I see now. Separately, these letters don’t make much sense. But if you put them together, like this,” and he lays the notes against one another on the table, revealing only the top portion of each, “then it spells out the message, _L do you know, cats love to have their chins scratched?_ ” His arms fold across his chest. “I can see why you think these were written by Muda. They were obviously meant to toy with you somehow.”

“Yes, I suppose that could be it,” L sighs. “But you’re wrong.”

 _“Wrong?_ ” He leans forward, two palms clutching the table lip, eyes swift to scan down upon the letters again. As he examines them, two hands shift into view to slip another note among the rest.

“Had you considered the possibility of another letter, you’d have known the message really should spell out, _L do you know, cats love to be kissed and have their chins scratched?”_

The lights gleam into the reflection of the table. He stares at the notes, studying the grooves of the writing across them. Though he burns inside, he offers a polite chuckling. “Well, I guess I didn’t consider that because it isn’t true. I think my cat would kill me if I tried to kiss him.”

“You have a cat?” More interest than he’s yet seen blooms in L’s eyes. Light leans back again into his own space, lips pursed as he nods. L tips a hand to his chin. “I’d assume whoever wrote these notes must be a cat lover himself, and to own cats is to love cats, one would think-”

“What are you saying?” Silence pools around them. Intensity rims along Light’s expression.

Plain, gentle, L sips his drink. “I’m only suggesting that, as a cat lover yourself, it should have been more obvious that there’d be another piece to this riddle.”

Where he wishes to twist his face into contempt, he plays the composure card. He wonders how a person can go through life spinning so many lies as this L character does, and to do so so convincingly in that flat, practiced tone, even when the words from it make no sense together- no, he’s got to messing with him. From the few days of acquaintance, Light is certain L would never slip up this way without intention. He wants to rile him somehow. He wants to take the upperhand. Peering down to the table, Light examines the letters one last time, taking keen note of every last pen stroke, their indents on the page, the mood of each message. Something’s off about them. Though, to point that out could carry forth a better chance at leverage over him. Light gathers himself in a breath. “Well, I guess you got me there. I didn’t consider that. I’ll be more thoughtful in the future.”

“No need.” Dark eyes trail lazy to the ceiling as a hand scratches through his hair. “That fourth note was a fake, you were right to begin with. You should have stood your ground.” He reaches forth to sweep the papers up into a neat little bundle again. “It would benefit you to pay closer attention to small details. Like the difference in the brand of pen used to write the first three notes and the fourth.”

 _Brand of goddamned pen? This guy has got to be a joke!_ His eyes clench in time to a fist below the table. No- he has to relax. In a way, he’s...right. If he has any hope of becoming the next chief of the Japanese police force, he’ll have to be as thorough as humanly possible. Though, something tells him L’s possibilities defy human limits. “You’re right, Ryūga. Although, how can you be sure I wasn’t bluffing to get you to admit that? If you were a suspect, and I was investigating you, I could have just pretended that I believed the fourth note was real, all to get you to say you made it up.”

Game, set, match all over again. He’s cornered him now.

“Yagami.” L stirs his drink idly. “You sure talk a lot, don’t you.”

Light flinches back, clutching his knees within either grasp. The _nerve_. Still, when those deep, dead eyes flick up to him, there’s a glint of childish humor tempting his lips.

He can’t stand this guy and his horrendous foreign face.

Yet, to be able to work so closely with the same force he’s diluting his livelihood to get within, to have his hands upon such intimate evidence like this, _everyday-_ it sets his soul ablaze. It outweighs the acrid taste on his tongue for the way this man speaks to him, or perhaps, it sits balanced on the same scale flat. Something. Something. Pastry cream and baggy jeans. A wicked humor painting the night. Something.

Enough for him to yank the chain.


	3. Chapter 3

“...Yeah. I decided I couldn’t pass up an offer like that.”

To his left, the new morning gleams, a fresh weekend churned up into wind in his hair, morality on his mind. To his right, hands grip two and ten, sun glinting off lenses that conceal honing pride. Souichirou simmers with it. “I’m glad to have you working alongside us, Light. I will admit, though...I’m worried for what may happen to you.”

“Worried? Come on, Dad, you know I can hold my own. I’m an adult.” His jawline is strong and tight, bleeding determination. “I know there’s a lot of dangers, but if no one’s willing to face them, there’d be no justice at all.”

“You’re right,” his father nods. “Still, if anything were to happen, I don’t know that I could forgive myself.”

“Dad, seriously, you’re worrying too much.” Easing the tension betwixt them, Light tries a laugh. “Besides, it was L who invited me to work with you all, not you. Go ahead and blame him if something happens to me.”

He predicts perhaps he’d be chastised were it not for the quick turn into a parking lot. Light blinks up against the sun outside the car window, shading his eyes with a hand to squint upwards. Sakura petals melt through the light. The building before them resembles nothing of the station he’s visited so many many times, rather a tall cast of brick and windows, sign out front bleating _SNOW STAR INN_ in wide western letters.

_A hotel?_ It very nearly melts off his tongue, _dumbly,_ but he’s guided to standing by the model of his father first once the engine has died. Concrete clacks back against their stride. He clutches his blazer tighter at the center.

“When we go inside, make no contact with anyone else. The other members of this task force should already be there, in Ryuzaki’s room.” He need not ask for confirmation, deduces it must be yet another new codename, though his father explains regardless, “That’s the name L has chosen to go by during this investigation. He asks that we all call him by that, no matter the circumstances.”

“Got it,” Light nods, voice matching the low pace of his father’s. Grayed eyes fall on him another long while, until Souichirou mimics the confirmation, and pushes the front glass door of the building.

“There you are! _Oooh!_ I’ve been waiting forever for you, Light!”

His expression fireworks into surprise. There’s not a moment enough for him to glance up to his father, not a tenacity enough, glued harsh on the zeal prancing toward him. And factors piece up into his mind- how she’s known his name, how’s she’s anticipated his arrival, how she’s called or named or known herself, a life-size doll tapping on toward him in six inch heels, fishnets, leather, lips two fat cherries waiting to pop. By the time she’s approached from her cutesy perch atop the front desk (clerk behind it a hot red in the face to see her go), Light’s still stunned so as to not object her grasp of arms thrown around his neck. He stumbles backward a step, though catches her with instinct to keep them each anchored. “Uh, excuse me...but do I know you?”

Her hands tell him so as they move to cup his face. “Of course you do, silly. You’re my guardian angel.”

“Angel…” he hears Souichirou cough overhead. He cringes against the squeeze of his cheeks, bringing his own hands up to pull hers away.

“I’m sorry, Miss, but you’re obviously mistaken-”

“You’re Yagami Light!” And if one more person says that to him- “You’re the world’s greatest detective who brought my parents’ murderer to justice. I’m forever in your debt!” Rather now, she lifts one palm to rest upon her own cheek, nails long and black to clash with sweet blonde tresses and hazel eyes. “Ahh, I can’t believe how lucky I am. I never expected you to be so young and handsome…”

Souichirou clears his throat into a hand. “You must be Amane-san.”

Glancing between his father and new disciple, Light pulls a taut frown. “Oh, Amane Misa? The model, right?”

“Model, actress, pop star, you name it!” She claps forward a bow. “Anything you want, Light. Oh! I’m so excited to finally meet you! This is, like, the best-best day of my entire life!”

Fingers clench into his palms. He’s thinking, here, pursing his mouth and fidgeting his brain. Anything he wants. Well, he _wants_ her to get the fuck away from him, promptly, but his father perhaps wouldn’t brand that quite gentlemanly. No- this girl’s suffering, an orphan, and so young, too. She must just need some attention. Though, she _is_ ogled at on magazine covers for a living.

...She must just need some positive attention.

Light attempts to deliver.

“Well, I’m glad that I was able to help you feel so much better, Amane.” Her eyes shine like diamonds. Around them, hotel personnel bustles, another coughing come from Souichirou’s throat. Impatience. Light demands his face into a smile. “It was nice to meet you. But I really have to get going. My father and I have some important business to attend to-”

“Detective work?!” she yelps, hugging her hands together as they drop to her waist. “Count me in! I’ll be your personal assistant.”

Beside them, Souichirou interjects in a heavy drop of his voice. “I’m afraid I can’t allow that, Amane. This is highly confidential police department work, civilians are not-”

“Oh, _pleeease,_ Mister Policeman, sir!” It isn’t lost on Light how quickly his father is to melt his steel exterior to the puppy pout facing him- he damns all Sayu’s years of manipulation, but hasn’t true time to intervene before Misa’s got her charm snaked all up his ankles. “I have nothing but admiration for your work! There’s no way I’d do anything to mess it up, I just want to watch Light in action. _Pleeease?_ I won’t tell anyone anything about anything, I promise! You have my oath.”

Souichirou, though eroded, does not entirely dissolve. Clenched distaste keeps solid on his face, as does it his son’s, both clipped away once a pouting whine slices the air.

“ _Weeell_ , if you won’t let me help, I guess you’ll never find out how I figured you’d be here at this hotel today. And you’ll _neeever knooow_ how I knew who you were, Light!”

His teeth drive together hard. Perception streams from her suddenly, more so than he ever would have expected of a ditsy blonde in a mini skirt and stick on lashes. One glance spins over toward his father to find he’s already doing the same. Tension claws his throat. Misa giggles a sweet clementine simper.

The room is dim as all hell once they find their way toward it. Besides the front most wall of monitors, buzzing and shining, there’s no light to be found, windows tapered in thick curtains, amenities luxurious from what he sees. Light follows his father’s stiff lead, trailed himself by the clutch of arms around his own right, gentle when he pries himself free after several steps. He’s glad the place is carpeted. The taps of stilettos on every step would certainly alert something off before he’s the chance to explain it.

Not the best way to start off his first day on the job, he trembles to think on. Perhaps he can think of a viable excuse- she’s got information he wants, that’s right. She’s sounded suspicious from the moment she’s opened her mouth, and he’s biding his time now to wait for her to slip up and admit something he wants to know. L would respect that. Any great detective would.

“Hey, Chief, we’ve been waiting for you!” At a squared table they advance nearer toward, a bony looking guy, couldn’t be past his twenties, blue suit red tie, stands with the same enthusiasm dotting his voice. “Your son’s here with you, right? Oh! That must be you. Hi, nice to meet you, I’m Matsuda!” From five feet away, he’s already thrown his hand out for a shake, though it freezes the identical moment to his beam peeling away for round mouthed shock. “ _Huh?!_ No way, Chief, your daughter is the real life Misa Misa?!”

“Quiet, Matsuda,” Souichirou cuffs, face stony with the pink of frustration.

The rookie winces in a sheeply little manner, shirt straining from its tuck as he lifts an arm to massage his nape. All the while, Light glances around the familiarity seated at the rest of the table; Aizawa, Mogi, Ukita, Ide. All faithful members of the police force he’s known since his early teen years, back when they’d all first started. That humors him, such a turn around as this. Once he’s stabilized back to reality, he focuses to the conversation midway through already, one where Misa’s listing off her backstory as far as her business here, which Matsuda’s eating up with silver utensils. He catches Aizawa’s eye roll as he sips his coffee mug. Souichirou calls the chatter off with his usual firmness. “That’s enough smalltalk. Has anyone seen Ryuzaki this morning?”

“Here.”

Light recognizes easily the dull moaning voice. He perks his gaze over toward where it has wisped, L’s tall thin figure slouched forward from one corner, standing with either hand working to clasp the front of his belt. A brow lifts. L pays him no mind.

Souichirou isn’t so good at concealing the joy that fills his eyes for _just_ a moment. He nods, solid and staid as ever. “Good morning, Ryuzaki. I apologize for arriving here later than planned.”

Sniffing in, L appears only the most bored as he advances toward the rest of them. “No need for apology. Stopping to pick up Light’s girlfriend must have taken some extra time.”

Together, the ones in question balk and beam respectively. Light sits upon the uncertainty of what he takes a greater offense to, the dirty implication or that he’s been downgraded to _Light_ now with the superior Yagami’s presence among them. To it all, his head shakes, and just as his lips part to answer, L steals the reigns again.

“Amane Misa, I presume? Yes, you must be. Have a seat. Watari will bring scones momentarily. Do you like blueberry?”

“Ryuzaki-”

“Aw, that’s so sweet of you! Did they say your name’s Ryuzaki? How cute, it’s almost like Ryūga!” One rolling chair claims her perched body, pushed as close to Matsuda as it takes to make him blush up his whole face and sputter a grin against his coffee cup. Ide glowers across the table, Mogi quiet in his own sip of morning tea. “I’m here to help Light out with his investigation. He’s a big important detective, you know.”

“Yes, I’m very aware,” L says. Light quakes within his own percolating irritation. He can tell by the look on L’s face that he’s teasing him, a feather toy taunting paws. The long table offset from the others has one seat wheeled backward. L curls his legs up to his chest as he sits in it, frontmost computer screen reflected against his pale face. “Light, if you would.”

Registering the command takes a protracted moment before he understands and shifts his way over for the second chair beside him. As he sits, he notices surveillance of dark eyes on his every motion.

“A scarf in April,” is the first comment fallen upon him. The scarlet fabric rests unwrapped to either side of his chest. Its existence boils up self awareness all of the sudden.

“Yeah. It was a Christmas gift from a relative.” Light tries his damnedest to keep his focus straightforward for the monitors. One displays the view of a nearby bus stop, another the bounds of a mall plaza parking lot.

More apparent, L lives only for making him twitch. “You care a lot for fashion, I’ve seen. More than the average eighteen year old male, wouldn’t you say?”

“Light’s the cutest guy in the whole world, of course he cares about how he looks. Just like I do.” Arms have circled round the back of his chair to envelop him at the chest. Misa rests her cheek to his hair, peering to the left at L’s stare upon them both. “Maybe we could give you some tips!”

“U-Uh-! Misa Misa, could you, um, come here and help me find my lapel pin? I think I dropped it somewhere.”

Over her shoulder, she tosses her hair to leer at him. “And how come _I_ have to help you find it? Can’t you see I’m busy tending to Light right now, Matsu?”

“Oh, right! Well, actually, it’s just that, ah, Mogi actually really wants an autograph, but he’s too shy to ask, so could you come here for just one second?”

Lips puckered, she stares down the table of suit clad men, bangles tinkling as she lifts a wrist to her hip. Across the room, Mogi glances between Matsuda, Misa, L’s crouched position off to the side. Swiftly, he offers a silent nod.

Light hardly cares to focus on what’s left of the exchange, though reminds himself to thank Matsuda later on. To his left still hunches L, hands poured over his kneecaps and face almost...sullen.

“And here I thought I was the cutest guy in the whole world,” murmurs his monotone. Light finds it a stress to pinpoint just when he’s being serious or not. Either way, he’d best compare L to a loaded rifle- with the way the others move so frantic to keep him from igniting clues him in. Behind him, he hears Ide’s voice mumble something lowly, hears his father reply and pull a seat out of his own. It’s a brisk and early Saturday. Thus far, it’s hard to say he’s enjoyed his time as part of the task force, though being able to say that is at all is a delight in itself. His eyes scan the screens before him for a target he knows not of, deciding anyway that it’s his best route for now. Only does his focus break at the clink of a saucer by his hand.

He blinks. A pastry drizzled in white icing rests in front of him now, peeking over a shoulder to catch a man he’s never seen before placing one before each other member behind him. Misa grins around something sweet, to which the man, _Watari,_ must be, chuckles dusty at and continues on his way. Ukita has blueberry crumbs on his upper lip by the time Light turns back away.

“So, Ryuzaki, about this case…” He chooses the safest possible notion, one thought over in his mind overnight amidst a fitful rest- he’s got the cat bite marks on his ankles to prove the fight. But he’d spent a while overturning the soil of contemplation as to where he’ll make his debut. It must be a worthy impression on not only L but the others as well, mostly so his father. Mustn’t be too overt, all the same. Showing up with a bottle blonde goth on his arm had already made him the peacock of the morning. He inhales through his nose, and swivels to face left. “Have you thought about the possibility that Muda actually _wants_ you to know his crimes are all connected? Maybe he’s trying to get people on his side in all of this- it would make sense, considering all of the online fan bases that have popped up.”

Misa claps her hands about a hundred times off behind them. The first card has just been set, awaiting L’s next move against it. Even working together, he feels some latent sense of competition between them. Who’ll get the most right answers, who’ll solve the whole case first. He watches L stuff his face with the second half of a strawberry scone, a second one waiting on the plate before him. “Yes,” he speaks through the mouthful. “In fact, I’ve already ruled it out as a possibility.”

“ _Huh?”_

“Yes, that’s true,” Souichirou affirms. “If the suspect were looking for attention, he would have addressed the public by now, even if it were under a disguise. It seems victims who we believe to be linked to this case are often those who publicly support his crimes.”

His teeth grind to a powder. “...I see.” No bother, he’ll recover. Faster, too, were it not for the smart lashing mouth beside him consoling, “Don’t worry. You’re entering this investigation after months of it already being worked on. You’ll catch up.”

“Oh, Light, you’re just too smart for them!” In an abrupt lunge, Misa has a palm slapped to the table, leant forward enough for eyes to wander easily up the backs of her thighs. Matsuda’s groan of pain to Mogi’s whack upon his shoulder sounds through his ears. Still, she goes on, “Tell them all the story about how you singlehandedly solved the whole Yukida case and saved my life!”

“If you could tone down the sycophanting, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover today.” When Light glances back left, the plate is empty of every last crumb. He blinks. L flicks a thumbnail across his lips. “I’d like someone to look into the recent burglary of the men’s clothing store in Nakano. Witnesses reported a man in all black, about one hundred eighty centimeters in height.”

“That description matches several calls we’ve gotten about supposed Muda sightings,” Aizawa comments, voice deep and strong. L only nods, toes curling against the chair bottom.

“Must have liked fashion,” he murmurs to himself alone. “And cats.”

Light glares sidelong at him. If only he had the will for outburst.

It waits until he’s in the comfort of privacy.

“There’s my boys, thank goodness you’re home.” The kiss to his cheekbone is mirrored instantly to his father’s, not a half minute after they’ve shed shoes and coats, casting a wrist rubbed over his cheek while Souichirou trembles beneath a soft smile. “Come in and get washed up, Sayu and I made curry rice. You can tell us all about your day over dinner.”

A nod and second kiss are offered for Sachiko on Souichirou’s walk past, Light following suit shortly after. Not two steps later must he catch himself from tumbling to his knees- what with the hairy blockade dancing around his ankles. Light scowls downward at him. Ryuk screams out a hello.

In the kitchen, he accepts a warmed bowl into his hold with gratitude, placed down to sit in his regular seat at the dining room table. Sayu tightens her ponytail in two hands before clapping them together to rub before a grin. She’s scooping up a mouthful of rice into her spoon as their mother takes her spot across. “So, Light, how did it go today? Was it everything you thought it would be?”

“It was...interesting, to say the least,” he laughs fake as a fur coat to accompany the avoidant answer. After a napkin dabbed to his mouth, Souichirou fills in, “He did very well keeping up with us. I wouldn’t be surprised if he already has a better understanding of the case than Matsuda does.”

“That’s our Light, always on top of things!” points Sayu.

Sachiko smiles with her hands folded kindly to the table. “I’m glad to hear it. Was it hard to work alongside such high profile detectives? I hope L-san was nice to you.”

His lids rest at half mast, jaw leant to a palm. Memories of the day resurface like a flood through his veins, from the moment Amane Misa had clung herself on him to every last backhand comment from the world’s greatest detective. It would bother him less if he could be certain L’s insults are indeed meant to be insulting- or...it may bother him more, then. But nevertheless, if he has to hear _it’s alright, Light, you can try again_ one more time, or _are you sure you’ve looked as closely at the details as you think?_ \- he’s halfway certain he’ll mangle the whole building to its bones. He hates above hate that he has no... _real_ reason to find such contempt for his new peer, working him up into more heated need for rivalry against him.

A nudge meets his knuckles, shifting his eyes back into focus from the blur they’d adopted. Ryuk rubs his toothy cheek across his fingers. He plucks a slice of beef from his pool of curry to drop on the ground before him.

“Light, your mother is talking to you.” Lightning lash, he snaps again to reality to lift his head and attend to his parents, Souichirou tipping a stern _look_ to him that works well enough to slap him into gear.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I guess I spaced out.”

Sachiko pets him with sweetness found only in a mother’s eyes. “It’s alright, Light, honey, you must be exhausted after today. Let’s- oh, don’t feed your dinner to the cat, please, he’ll get sick.”

He blinks, realizing the purely absent minded scoop of rice he’s just dropped beneath the table. Snarling breaths through his smushed nose, Ryuk devours it, licking his lips while the first chunk of meat lays untouched at his feet.

His bed has never been so uncomfortable.

The ceiling plays a staring match with him as he lays to his back, wrist stretched out before him to massage within the opposite hand. Moonlight hums past the translucency of the side window curtains. He can hear his sister through the back wall gabbing on the phone with a friend from school, Ryuk’s ears flicking every time she breaks out in a fit of squealing laughter. One hand drops to scratch between those ears. Purring stirs up from his throat.

Everything is tranquil this evening.

Light reaches his palms up to rest on his face, and shrieks a long, low growl into them.

_The goddamned audacity!_ He doesn’t know that he can take another day of this. Not the toil of the investigation, but the turmoil that follows in his mind. L is toying with him, he _knows_ it, from the moment he’d locked eyes with him at the entrance exams, it’s all been a game to him. It shouldn’t infuriate him so flagrantly as it does, and he shakes into more ire knowing he’s giving L just exactly what he wants, the attention of thoughts. Plaguing, interminable thoughts. Every insinuation of his guilt twists the knot in his gut even tighter. The _nerve_ of that _bastard._

“Light? Was that you that made that noise? Are you okay?” Sayu prattles outside his bedroom door. He turns his head toward it, blinking away a few breaths before he can call back, “I’m fine, it was just my TV.”

Through the door again, she says, “Oh, okay!”, and he can picture the press of her glittery cell phone back to her cheek as she trails away saying, “Nothing, Rinko, it was just my stupid brother. Anyway-”

As her voice fades off, Light twists his head back upright, expression a blank slate for what remains of his resolve. He figures it won’t do him any good to marinate in such ill feeling all night. He’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime, to work so intently on such a salient investigation. The idle taunting from his superiors will have to be accustomed to over time. Certain, he’s certain there’s no way L is so bad as he’s made him to be in his mind. He’ll give him a chance, just the same as L has given him. After all, yes, right, he’s jumped the gun with his judgements before, and doesn’t think it quite fair of him to stamp another as insufferable after such few meetings. And his father thinks so highly of him- there must be something redeemable if that’s the case.

He’ll go in tomorrow with an open mind, and every other time after that, because he’s Yagami Light the gentleman, not one to let conflict stand in the way of his desires.


	4. Chapter 4

“You may want to try a fork instead.” The day is new and fresh and wet and tepid. “Shortcake is crumbly.”

The bits of vanilla in his lap attest to that. Stone faced, he brushes them onto the floor, placing the broken chunk of cake in his hand back onto the plate it came from. _Damn L_. It’d been his insistence to begin with that had even led him to eating cake at ten AM at all. Refusing would be rude. And he quite likes strawberries. But that’s a separate point.

“...Thanks, Ryuzaki. I would have never come to that conclusion without your guidance.” Perhaps he plays off the sarcasm too faultlessly for sincerity, as L’s only response is a nod of his head as he goes back to nibbling on his thumb and peering at the screens above.

“ _Guuuh…_ Doesn’t anything interesting ever happen? I feel like we’ve been listening in on this guy for hours, and he hasn’t said a single suspicious thing.” Matsuda scratches his ear beneath the radio headset. Beside him, Ukita adjusts his own off to say, “If you were a mass murderer, would you go around talking about it all day?”, to which Aizawa, fiddling with the reception dials, mutters, “Knowing Matsuda’s stupid mouth, he probably would.”

“All of you, settle down,” Souichirou commands. “We won’t get anything done if we’re bickering all day long.”

Several _yes, Chief_ s mutter out, and the table falls to passionate silence again.

Over the room’s other side, Light has eyes turned upon him in such a quick flash, he’d deem L’s true nature that of a barn owl.

“Light,” he whispers, not out of clandestine fate but only the way he is and acts. “Regarding Amane, what do you think the likelihood is that she’d be willing to help us out with this investigation?”

“That she’d be willing to? I’d say, one hundred percent,” Light answers, then frowns against, “That she’d actually do a good job, probably around a one in ten chance.”

“Interesting,” L deduces. “You’ve known her only one day, yet already believe to know her character so thoroughly.”

His derision deepens. A women pushing a grocery cart ambles across one parking lot surveillance screen. “Well...you’re the one that asked my opinion.”

“Yes, I did, didn’t I…” His gaze remains steady overhead. One finger lifts to lay heavily on one transceiver button. “Mogi, how are you and Ide doing with the robbery suspect?”

Crackling sounds through the speaker before a deep voice shuffles to life. _“It’s going well, Ryuzaki, sir. We were able to get a better description from the workers at the clothing store. It seems like he isn’t the same man that you have wiretapped, though.”_

“Mmm,” L hums against his finger. “So, we’re either dealing with false identification on your part, or my suspicions of these two crimes being related were incorrect.”

“What about an accomplice?” Light suggests suddenly. “The guy we’re tracking could be the main _Muda_ as we know him, and these smaller crimes could be the work of his followers. And you said the people he kills usually were his supporters, right? He could be manipulating people into committing crimes that take the attention off of him, and then killing them right after to avoid any possible slip ups.”

The hotel room dies to even harder silence. He watches L’s soft lips massage against each other, his finger pressing again to the transmitter button. “Mogi, don’t lose sight of where your suspect goes. Track his every move.”

_“Right.”_

The signal dies off between them. L brings his arms to rest folded over his knees as he watches straight forward. Magic works behind his glassy eyes, Light knows. As he examines the wheels grinding in his mind, a full minute post now, L gradually unfurls from himself to reach for the thermos of coffee atop the table, pours a hot dark stream into a cup that Light is caught off guard to have handed his way, wordlessly.

“You’ll return to class tomorrow, correct?” L’s voice, again, is soft, rubs circles down Light’s skin. He holds the coffee cup in one hand, just holds it there as he looks at L some more, then sets it to the table, gives a noise of confirmation. “I’ve arranged it so I’ll have plenty of time to work here after my morning classes. I’ll have less time to study and do homework, but I’m not so worried about that. I’ve never had a problem keeping up with my work before.”

L chews his lip. It pops wetly back into place for him to say, “Don’t burn yourself out. Should you decide you’d rather focus on school than this investigation, by all means.”

“Are you serious? No way. If anything, I’d give up college to continue working this case.” One shoulder lifts forward. “After all, I’m only going to school in the first place to get to work with the police force. Now, I’m already here. Dividing my time won’t kill me, I’ll be alright.”

A physical shrug doesn’t come so much as it does in his tone. “If you say so,” is all he has to offer, reaches out to grasp his fork between thumb and index and scrape up a portion of plain white frosting. Light watches it swallow down his throat, fork tongs resting in his mouth a prolonged while afterward.

It drops to a sudden shout behind them.

“R-Ryuzaki..! I think you should listen in on this!”

Twisting his head over one shoulder, L’s eyes are at their widest point, keeping tight interest on the headset Matsuda pulls off his shaggy hair. Ukita, teeth bared into an exhilarated cringe, slaps the volume dial to its highest frequency, the high pitched din fixed by Aizawa turning it back moderate. Between the fussing with it, the sound quality begins to project from the speakers enough for the whole room to catch, _“-think they’re following you, then throw them off your trail. Drive around the whole city if you have to, but be sure to meet me back at the Snow Star Inn by noon. You know my room number. Don’t fuck this up.”_

The reception follows with a dull _click,_ perhaps that of a cell phone snapped shut, and further sounds of exhaust rumbling through. A symphony of disease. Light stands harshly from his seat.

“That’s it, then! We have to track everyone who comes through here tonight, and stop him!”

“ _Gh_ ,” comes a chiding grunt from Aizawa, “If we profile every civilian who enters this hotel, we’ll attract too much attention. The suspect will go somewhere else, and we’ll lose him.”

“I believe Aizawa’s right, Light,” his father agrees, pressing his glasses up his nose in one nudge.

From across the table, Ukita tosses up a hand and proclaims, “It’s perfect luck that our suspect chose this hotel to come to tonight. We can’t be careless and mess that up!”

“It sure is lucky, though, Ukita’s right!” Matsuda rises with fists pumped for glory at his front. “We really have a chance here to catch this guy! We just have to monitor the front desk and wait until a Higuchi Kyousuke checks in.”

“It’ll be easy enough to have one of you take the place of the desk clerk,” L mumbles around the finger in his teeth. “Though, in the event that he uses an alias-”

“Won’t you be able to recognize him by his appearance, anyway?” questions Light, to which Ukita tells him, “We’ve never seen his face before.”

That brings him into a blink. It’s a predicament, surely- he can tell by the ferocity of L’s bites upon his finger as he sits in thought. Glancing back left, Souichirou and Aizawa hang their heads into shame, Matsuda and Ukita peering around curiously as to appear melted into wonder.

“Well,” Light starts. “Well, what if...whoever’s posing as the desk clerk wears the headset, and they’ll hear what Higuchi is saying both directly to them and in their headset at the same time. That way, we’ll be able to identify him by knowing he’s the guy we have a wiretap on.”

“Hey, yeah!” says Matsuda. “Light, you’ve done it again. You always have the answers!”

He tries his best to keep the swell from his head. Certainly, he does always have the answers, though the proportion to which they are the correct ones does not sit so well balanced.

“Yes,” L says, “In the event that he drives his car inside of the hotel lobby, that plan will work perfectly.”

Light freezes, daring not open his eyes to the indignity sure to face him. “I take it you only put transmitters in his car, then…”

“Well, what if whoever’s at the desk asks for identification?” Aizawa suggests to break up the brewing ache. “He can sign in using a fake name, but the chances that he’s gone so far as to carry a fake ID aren’t likely.”

“It’s a shot in the dark,” murmurs L. He drops his hands to push himself up from his seat. “But one we’ll have to take. Matsuda, arrange it with the real desk clerk to take their position until twelve thirty.”

Said pawn slumps forward, smile wary and tested. “Why did I have a feeling it’d be me who’d end up with this role...”

L continues on without hitch. “As for the rest of you; Aizawa, you’ll be here to monitor the cameras we have placed in the main lobby. Ukita, stay with him to manage the transmitter signals should Mogi or Ide try to contact us.”

The pair of them bow in tandem, whilst Souichirou steps forward to proclaim, “I’ll remain downstairs in place of the doorman for backup should something go wrong.”

“Yes, that’s good. And Light,” it’s the call from the doctor after a scan it’s the results of an exam not studied for, it’s remembering the fruit tart in the oven four hours after it’s been thrown in; the way L speaks to him is a blade down his thigh. “Come with me to my room.”

Apprehension controls him from there. He glances, reservation in his mile long stare toward his father who’s already begun to direct Matsuda out toward the exitway. Ukita and Aizawa sit to man the screens and phones, L already crept over a ways opposite. Light feels no other option than to accept his demand, fists clenched at either hip, muscles tight with the readiness to flee.

If only he were quick enough to use it.

L’s shadow crawls around the corner into a long hallway, one he’s never before traveled. In his weekend here so far, he’s had a handful of bathroom trips this way, seen Watari cart half a hundred sweets from a door over near, but never has he so intimately entered the corridors of L and his life like this. Hands in denim pockets, he shuffles forward until reaching a lone door at the hall’s end, where Light takes into consideration just how lavish this suite expands. Regardless, he steadies himself to clone L’s entrance past the threshold, not entirely loving of the way it’s clicked shut behind him. He swallows. L makes no indication of minding his stress.

“I feel that I’ve known you long enough to be honest with you.” He does not quite _pace,_ rather walks the line of the midpoint in this room- one embellished with velvet upholstery on the gilded armchairs, sheer lace curtains to cover the bay window along one wall, the most compact form of a flat screen television he’s ever seen, and all to surround the centerpiece of a queen size bed draped in unmade white blankets, pillows slumping at various disarray. It’s dark, too, in here, dark as the rest of the rented suite always seems to be. Light isn’t surprised that someone with skin so fair would be sensitive to brightness.

Only is he pulled to the surface of his gazing reverie by the cold clink of metal around his left wrist.

“I don’t suspect you of being Muda yourself, though there is a two percent chance you are somehow involved in this case.” Astonishment blares on his face as he glares downward to the handcuff connecting his wrist on a long chain to one of L’s own. “To ensure I don’t lose sight of you during all of this commotion with the potential perpetrators being here, I have to keep you nearby at all times.”

“Hold on, you really think that _I’m_ part of this?! Ryuzaki, with all due respect, that’s completely insane.” He tugs forcefully on his restraints, which does not work to faze the other. Breath flames through his nostrils. There’s no sense in getting aggressive or brash- that would only increase his suspicions of being a violent criminal. The chain between them jingles at another small thrash of his hand. Futile. “...At least tell me this is only for tonight.”

“That depends on what our plans reveal. If I’m absolutely certain you have nothing to do with Muda or any other unlawful behavior, then you’re free to go.”

“And you’ll apologize for suspecting me.”

“Light.” The fatigue in his eyes drags over to land upon him. “You know this isn’t something I want to do. I am a detective before I am anything else, that includes a friend. Don’t get fresh with me.”

In some far corner of his mind, he’s reminded of the hot eared flush he’d have to his mother’s rebuking. _...Right. Some friend._ Abruptly he’s jolted from his standing spot to be dragged along with L’s turn for the mini fridge atop his dresser. “There’s nothing much left to do now until our suspects arrive,” he says idly, pulling a prepackaged snack cake from the refrigerator. As he ambles over to sit atop the disheveled bedding, Light recalls the half hour ago upon which L had scarfed a thick slice of shortcake, and takes note that he’s got the mindset to equate boredom with hunger. Like a child. Like a beagle. The wrapper is peeled back on the Zebra Cake after a blink, half the snack vanished into his mouth after one more. A while drips on, quick, fleeting, before he’s caught in his deep, flat staring.

“What’s made you so moody all of a sudden?” L asks with his mouth stuffed. The snack, bite marks and spittle and all, is held forward beyond L’s round curious eyes. “Want some?”

Light stares at him, face dark to turn the other way. “Gee, I don’t know, Ryuzaki. Maybe I’m feeling upset that you just framed me for mass murder.”

“How dramatic,” comes back at him, and it would vex him were he not so enthralled by what follows it, hardly even believing himself that he’s just heard L cough up such a hard laugh. His peripheral vision gleams with the lingering frosting-coated smirk.

Though he hardly has a grasp on what to say, Light is prepared to speak just as interruption comes knocking. Watari. “Ryuzaki. The others have requested you join them in the screen room at once.”

“That quickly…” L’s eyes are bright with wonder. “Our first suspect must have been right around the corner.”

The snack wrapper is balled and left behind in L’s place on the bed, Light mingling his gaze with it until he’s forced up by the leash on his wrist. His footing is gained back halfway through the hall, managing to catch up with a pace he never knew L could even go.

“Ryuzaki, take a look at this.” Ukita leans out of the way enough to allow L room to scan the center laptop screen. Beside him, Aizawa rolls back in his seat to take a glance over Light head to toe to...hand. “What’s with the...new bracelet?”

“Ryuzaki has abandonment issues,” Light comments, to which the one in question yanks the cuff chain hard enough to make him stumble, yet himself goes on refined and unaffected. Beyond it all, Ukita prods a finger to the screen. “This guy, talking to Matsuda right now. Could it be him? He looks to match the description.”

Slouched deeply forward, L hums with a finger to his teeth. “Looks too tall.”

“What? But you said witnesses said Muda was about one hundred eighty centimeters?”

His lip is strummed once down before standing back up into his own space. “To be honest with you, I made that bit up. I only wanted a reaction out of Light had he thought he fit the description of Muda to such a T.” L’s eyes wander to the ceiling above, voice muffled by the finger dipping about his bottom gums. “The real reports said he was short, about 5’5- er, what’s that, around one sixty five?”

The trio of gawks around him play him no harm, not even once Ukita shoots to standing and fires off toward him, “Y-You lied to us about such an important detail? Do you know what could have happened if we’d gone after the wrong person, because you misled us like that? Ryuzaki, that’s...totally irresponsible of you.”

Rather than rivaling with anger, L responds with a sigh. “Relax, please. There’s no room for such volatile emotions on this task force.”

“Wha- Maybe I should just quit, then, is that what you mean?!”

“Ukita, get a hold of yourself-!”

“Let him go,” L interjects. “At the very least, for some breathing time. I understand this is a high stress investigation, I don’t blame any of you for behaving outrageously from time to time.”

“ _Outrageously_ ,” is the final breath of him as he throws an arm for the exit door, throws it back to latch harshly shut behind him. Light keeps himself quiet, peering toward the lobby camera feed for the several minutes it takes for Ukita to appear. Though they rest out of range for the audio to be consumed, he watches his father cut into the storm for the front doors, watches conversation unfold between them until after long pressed minutes, a hand rests to Ukita’s arm, the lesser nodding once before making his way toward a nearby fountain to flip a paper cup beneath. It calms him enough to fear no fall apart of their whole force, yet still unquelled rests the ire at the surface of his throat. _L…_

The rotten puppetmaster in question stands in his shepherd's hook posture, staring toward the video surveillance without word. Aizawa does his best to remain collected as he does the same. Tension bleeds against the three of them, until a blinking call demands a bottom monitor. Left button pressed down, Aizawa clips, “Mogi. What is it?”

Light leans forth to listen. Static. Then, _“Hatori Arayoshi parked his car four blocks away and has been walking_ _by himself ever since. Ide remained in our car just in case, while I got out to trail him on foot, too. It looks like he’s headed in the direction of your hotel.”_

“That means there’s a high probability Higuchi has already come through here,” L concludes, then taps Aizawa on the shoulder. “Tell him to enter as closely behind Hatori as possible without seeming suspicious. He’ll have to signal to Matsuda that that is our suspect in order for Matsuda to then ask what room number he’s heading to.”

Aizawa nods, and leans into the mic to repeat the orders when Mogi’s voice insists in, _“Understood. We should be arriving soon.”_

The connection is cut off there.

Light stares at the wall to the far right. With such advancements simmering now, there’s no time for him to sulk in bitterness over the injustice of L’s justice system. Still...if he were any lesser man, there’d be blackened eyes and bloodied knees by this point.

“Pay close attention to Matsuda’s interaction with Hatori once he comes in,” L orders, pinching himself up to take the emptied seat aside Aizawa. “Both of you.”

Tilting his jaw high, Light pierces the back of his head with a searing glare, softening into eyelids pressed shut, exhale gone out the nose. He’s a professional. He’s a police officer.

Standing betwixt the two of them, he folds his arms over his chest, and does as told.


	5. Chapter 5

Room 13E. The floor directly beneath the task force base. It had taken a while of berating on their impromptu secretary’s part, but Hatori had at last scrawled down his destination, as per the new _visiting guest protocol_ that hadn’t existed fifteen seconds before his entrance; nevertheless, they’ve all got to admit, Matsuda’s got a knack for improvising on the very dead center spot. It leads Light to wonder in some stripped down free time just what kind of trouble he’d been in so often in adolescence that would lead to such a skill. But he hasn’t the time for that. He’s got two dozen equations to solve before tomorrow morning.

“X is fifteen twenty-thirds,” drawls the one slouched over his shoulder. No sun beams through the shaded summer windows, leant over the desk he’s foreign to yet is sure to acquaint with fast. “Y should be eleven and a half.”

And Room 13E had promised glory and gold to them all, waiting up through the most orange hours of the evening to sip up what’s to be said; Mogi had offered himself as a spy yet again, though Ukita’s rejoin to the group bid himself in the role, and had taken to laying his ear to the room door so long as he could. The others stood upstairs with bated breaths. L had gnawed his cuticles raw, nearly. Light couldn’t be bothered with anything more than the perspiration choking the back of his neck.

After over an hour’s worth of it, seven gazes snapped up immediately to the push open of their suite’s door, Ukita entering to say there’d been a radio playing some folksy station the whole time, so it’d been hard to decipher what business had been exchanged. And the seventy year old woman done up in polyester that had knocked him on his ass with the room door once she’d gone to exit hadn’t had much information to give on the matter, either.

Ide’s forehead had dropped to the table top then, Souichirou resting his tired eyes into one palm.

The handcuff chain clinks between them.

“I really don’t need your help, Ryuzaki. I can do these on my own.” They’re closeby one another at the long desk of monitor screens. It’s just the same as the past six days working alongside the task force, only the third now within new bounds. He’d been kicked from his seat Tuesday’s mid-morning at given instruction, told to accompany down to the car outside, there’s a much needed change to push forth.

“I don’t care for change. It’s a distraction,” is all L had said once they’d arrived at the brand new headquarters, a full storied building all to themselves that had been under Watari’s ownership a long while, and Light had slipped a comment on the interior being so acutely similar to the hotel suite they’d had set up previously. He could only nod then, and perch himself to his normal brand new regular spot to L’s right side, and begin his day of investigating.

Today he’s got his past days’ school load to catch up on, since said investigation has slowed, since he’s refused to attend classes with a grown man strapped to his wrist. An email to his professors proclaiming his sudden bout of pneumonia had earned floods of sympathy, offers even to forget the work he’s requested (to which he’d gone to decline, paused, thought it over...and declined, since he’s got a reputation to uphold). He works frenetically now, even with L’s distractions, teasing pokes to the cheek to tell him he ought to be resting if he’s got such a _terrible_ sickness, to which he’d slapped the hand away and ignored Matsuda’s snickers behind them.

He wonders, in the midst of synthetic division, what other eighteen year old university student has to miss their third week of classes because they’ve been physically detained as a potential murder suspect. The idea has since stopped sickening him so, accepting now that L has a job to carry through, and were he in the same position, he’d go to whatever means necessary to convict the deserving malefactor. This is all routine. Still, he had promised the pretty girl beside him in his English course that he’d call her soon, and it’s been eight days now. And he’d promised Amane Misa that he’d go on a date with her at the cost of her information on how she’d ever found him, and that had been five days ago now, and now there’s a pounding knock at the front office door, and Mogi is soft enough a gentleman to open it without question.

“Mochi! I haven’t seen you in forever!” She grasps his held up wave of greeting within both her hands. Smiling so sweet, her lips move to further, stopped only once she spots the corner flickers of monitor screens. “Light! There you are, I was getting wor-”

The sudden stop, though he has yet to turn to face her, tells him she’s laid a look upon the silver chain link elephant in the room. “Um, hey...how come you guys are handcuffed to each other? Is this part of some special investigation ritual?”

“Ryuzaki and Light are working out their differences,” Mogi explains, to which Light groans at the missed humor to correct, “Ryuzaki suspects me of being involved in the Muda case, so he’s keeping an eye on me.”

Instantly, Misa gasps into her fingertips. One set lashes down to bat L on a bicep. “Shame on you, Ryuzaki! Don’t you know my Light is a believer of justice and morals? He would never do something so awful.”

To her stance at his right side, L swivels his head in slow, slow notches, until he’s staring at her with his signature darkened deadpan that makes her recoil away in unease, so happening to land upon Light’s open lap. “You guys are way too intense around here,” Misa huffs, raising an arm to wrap around his shoulders. Light keeps himself as unresponsive as possible, while she goes on, “Don’t you do anything beside sit around and stare at computer screens, or listen in on people’s boring conversations? I’d go crazy if I stayed inside as much as you do, Ryuzaki.”

“I’d go crazy if I had the option to,” L replies, then glances over the notebooks left open on the opposite side of the table. “How is your homework going, Light?”

Pinching his mouth, Light ignores the rub of a palm across his chest. “Oh...it’s fine, I guess.”

It’s as weak of an answer as he’s ever bestowed, yet with all the pingponging distractions snatching up his composure it’s a miracle he’s to talk at all. In one hop, Misa lifts herself up off of him, clutching her purse straps in one hand by the hip, tilting her head so cute and photogenic. “Oh, you’re doing homework? I shouldn’t interrupt you then. But just letting you know, I’ve always thought college guys are _really_ hot.”

Her giggle would make any man wish he had a master’s degree. Silent to uphold her promise, she still hovers over his shoulder, distracted enough by the flip open of her cell phone as to not bother him further. Light only wishes he could breathe.

“Hey, everyone, I think I’ve got something.”

Simultaneously, the group of them toss looks over toward Ide. He wrests the headset off one ear, eyes sharp as he continues to listen. “It’s the new guy we’ve been tracking, Namikawa. He says he’s going to the BayStars game tomorrow night, and has asked someone to meet him there to _discuss_ an issue.”

Blinking follows the announcement, next shifting focus to their top leader as so frequently lost baby sparrows will. Crouched in his spot, L fingers his lip a moment before spinning back around toward his control panel. “Watari,” he says once holding down the call button to the back room, “Purchase three tickets for the BayStars game tomorrow night at Yokohama Stadium.”

“Alright, free baseball game? Count me in,” proclaims Matsuda, but Misa pokes her nose his way with her own assertion.

“Silly Matsu, of _course_ Ryuzaki wants Light to go undercover and investigate this Namikawa guy, and he’d just look stupid if he didn’t bring a date!” Dream rose fogs her eyes. “It’ll be amazing, a date with Light where I get to see him in action first hand. This is all I could ever ask for! Just me and Light, and-” The sweet perfume pink drains away just as soon as those damsel eyes of hers drag along her date’s left arm, wrist, hand, chain link of fate all the way up to the nightmare face of his partner in crime solving. L does not blink as their stares connect, a wide _strange_ smile pressing to his lips that appears eerie well past benevolence. Misa looks as though her stomach could spill up all its bile.

* * *

 

“If you keep sitting like that, they’re gonna point you out on the fan cam.”

So many bodies pressed all together makes the mission that much harder. It’s a dense crowd for both teams, and that being the case, he’s deciding he can trust that their target can be found on this side. And they’ve his face this time. Spotting someone without the finest idea what they look like would be impossible in a stadium this full of roaring thrashing fans, knowing what to search for makes it...a half percent easier, one wise mind had put it.

His comment’s been paid no mind to, L keeping his eyes in a tight scan about the crowd. Sun beams down on his flesh. The feeling of the fresh coming summer air is welcome after being held captive in a dungeon of computer screen glow the only light for close to a week now. His hand moves to massage the knot in his lower back, sweet courtesy of the hardwood headquarters floor that very same pitch black week long. Good God does he miss being able to breathe on his own, and Good _God_ does he miss his bed- isn’t his mother lonely without him? His father had slipped some excuse for the two of them taking a sudden leave away from home to live full time at the base, a fault on L’s shoulders who’d decided it would be best to confine the crew into one space for easy and efficient access to each other whilst the investigation heats up so untamed. They’d all moved themselves into rooms on the mid floor without fighting him. Light could shred his hair off.

“Aw, what’s the matter? Does your back hurt? Do you need a massage?” To his right, Misa places a manicured hand to his shoulder as she pours concern out over him. He pauses the motion to sit up straight again, faces better forward.

“I’m alright, it’s just hard to sleep on the floor for a week straight.” Before she can coo sympathy for his burdens, another folds his own notion atop; “I told you, you’re welcome to sleep in the bed with me.”

Like absolute _hell_ would he ever, because sleeping with L is not _sleeping,_ it’s laying with an arm slung over the eyes to shade from his laptop brightness, it’s turning violently over to evade the sound of cookie crunching after the clock’s wound past three:thirty, it’s being poked and prodded at dawn to the wisdom that he’s slept four hours, that’s plenty. He can’t _sleep_ beside a person who’s so messy and noisy and active in fits of shifting himself about all hours of the night. The floor is fine. The floor is just fine.

Misa must disagree. “I think you should just uncuff him already. There’s no way Light could be Muda, he hasn’t left your sight in a week!”

“And no one has died since,” murmurs he with little interest. The pair to his side both seethe in their silence.

An overhead announcer proclaims something of a pitcher and a fastball and halftime soon approaching. There’s been little moments where Light has paid any true attention to the game, focused so hotly on perusing the crowd along either end. They’ve yet to pick out Namikawa, though with an intermission upcoming, he steels his attention even more brusque. Patrons will be floating in and out enough now to distract from spotting him. He _has_ to stay on task.

“Oh, Light, I have something that’ll make you feel better.” Purse in the fat of her lap, Misa digs through it a while before producing with her smile a crinkling pink wrapper to hand his way. “I brought snacks! This is for you. Maybe it’s symbolic of something, oh, I don’t know, something _else_ that involves rings and sweetness?”

Giggling. Light alters not his expression as he hesitates there, though does grasp upon the proffered candy. Ring Pop. Strawberry. His stare is bleary upon it, more so through it, until another one that much more sinister is felt burning into his skull; without further interaction, he passes the candy over to his left, wrapper torn open in seconds to shove the plastic ring upon a middle most finger.

 _He has to stay on task._ For all he knows, Namikawa could have just slipped out among the throngs of sweaty civilians making their way for the snack bar, traipsing along with whomever he’d invited here to wring out iniquity. The announcer caterwauls about half price soda, a deal just unmissable. He grasps the fabric of his slacks. Focus. It’s the most malignant cacophony of _noise_ ever dipped into, yet Light can only feel silence sizzling its electric measures against his skin. He’ll find him. If it’s the last thing he does on his Earth, he’ll find Namikawa, and everyone else who has even a lick to do with Muda, and take them down barehanded and blindfolded if he has to. For Japan. For his father. For justice.

“Oh.” A tongue laps out against crystallized strawberry sugar. “I found him.”

Unadmitted, Light flinches in his spot, though decides it better to assist than deflect. “ _Where?_ ”

L does not match his intensity. He’s half dead in his hunch forward as per usual, sucking the candy like a pacifier from his finger while one of the opposing hand lifts to point straight up forward. Light follows the trail of it, eyes wide upon the final target.

Wide, long, expansive, a screen for the rest of the game portraying its players at closer catch has switched to scanning over the stadium seats, a border drawn up around waving grinning spectators. The close up brought on now details a man, mid of age yet still with silken black tresses behind the head, eyes sharp, delicate almost, muttering into a cell phone on his cheek. Namikawa. Light watches him gradually blink into reality, stare raised up and vast a second before thinning again. A hand lifts to shoo away the camera, turning himself inward to impede the view of his features.

“Should we go follow him?”

 _“Hoho! Some people aren’t having as much fun tonight as others! Wanwah!”_ echoes over the announcer’s mic.

L stares. “No.”

“No?”

“He’ll know for sure that we’re trailing him,” L says. “And there’s a strong possibility that he could recognize you if their group has become familiar with the police force members. If he’s as skilled a conman as I expect, then he has.”

At times, Light loathes just how intently L thinks through issues. It’s too perfect- and he’s right this time, something Light hadn’t fully yet considered, being that of his own recognizability as the police chief’s son. Fame is new to him.

Evidently, the same feeling does not find the one beside him.

_“Whoa-OH! Celebrity spotting in our very stadium! Tokyo’s own Misa Misa, here to cheer on the BayStars!”_

He throws his gaze right, where Misa has blinked once, though transforms at telephone booth speed into the cutesy supermodel here to wink and wave and pucker kisses on the fan cam screen to her admirers. The roar of the crowd around has stretched so bold he can barely hear his own thoughts, but of them he does know runs through his mind the same second Misa reaches out to grasp his arm, _If she draws attention to me, Namikawa will see me on the screen, just like L said, I can’t let that happen-_ and by God, when he hears the blaring sound effect of heaven’s harp, and glances up to see the border around the screen has been changed to a red hot heart with Misa Misa and her red hot date in the center - _If she kisses me in front of everybody watching this, I’m going to hang myself._

But he has no worries to cater to. As he’s moving to conceal his face in his palms, the job is done for him by two most foreign, long and cold and with plastic hindering the touch of a middle most, two hands cupping his face to turn him leftways and tug his shocked, unpuckering mouth against L’s.

Misa shrills a gasp.

 _“Ohohoho! Looks like Misa Misa isn’t taken after all! There’s hope for us yet!”_ The mic feedback deafens him. _“Good love to you, boys! Ah- look here! Minato Yumi-chan, owner of Happy Peaches Bakery in Kamakura! We love Yumi-chan’s famous bread rolls-!”_

With the camera off of them, the touch evaporates from his face in one quick loss, focusing after stun to catch L curled back into his regular little bundle, clutching his shins, watching the crowd where Namikawa sits. He bites the head off of his candy in one loud _crunch._

Light cannot seem to close his jaw.

Behind his twisted form, Misa suffers the same, yet collects herself kindly into a soft push of the voice. “Oh, Light. I had no idea you were into boys, I didn’t mean to mess up you and Ryuzaki’s relationship!” He hasn’t the time for more than sputtered messy refusal before she’s standing in one swoop, clutching her purse in one hand, phone tossed open before her throbbing thumb. “I’ll call my friend Rem to come pick me up. Bye, enjoy the rest of the game! I’ll be back tomorrow so we can hang out again!”

“Misa, w- wait!”

He’s lost her in one prance forward to gaggles of fans throwing their phones and notebooks up toward her. He supposes, still, that correcting her is the least of his worries now, in fact feels somewhat of a relief to have her unmoved by the idea of his love any longer. He supposes, still, that he’d slit his own throat if he weren’t wearing such a nice white sweater.

It’s only imaginable the spectacle he’s just been turned into. The rest of the force, all tasked with watching the game from headquarters to keep an extra eye on things- Matsuda’s probably gone and dropped his hopeless romantic jaw to the floor, spewed something stupid about how nice a scene it’s been, Aizawa scoffing something cynical, his father turning his flushed clench-eyed face away in the embarrassment to see such a thing. He’s only glad his mother’s not a baseball fan, though he’s sure this would be the only day of the year where the soap drama on was a repeat, and Sayu had flicked the channel to a random one for boredom’s sake just in time to say, _“Hey, is that Light?”_ with Ryuk on his mother’s lap coughing up his raspy meows he _swears_ so often are cackles at his expense.

And the worst of it is, he can’t even storm off. The chain clinks with a lift of his hand.

L makes not a sound again.

Marigolds sway toward the sunshine along the grass outside the stadium as they exit, amid the third quarter where Namikawa’s made a move for the door and the pair of them as one have trailed a minute post. Fingers pinch the top of a cell phone to flip a call for Watari, waiting in the parking lot the whole game through, to start the car, keep an eye on Namikawa should he see him. Light is dragged along the path through hundreds of cheering spectators, ears ringing and neck flush still as they clip across the lot to tumble into the car’s backseat.

A radio receptor picks up Namikawa’s signal in time to hear him grumble about neither of his invited guests showing up today, about the waste of money on tickets. His path leads them to a hotel outside Yokohama. Namikawa enters, and they wait, and nothing at all happens, and they wait, and Watari turns the car back round the corner and drives back to headquarters.

Light wishes he had the option to sleep in the backseat. Up to the elevator, he’s tugged by the wrist, standing at the opposite side and making no eye contact with either man aside him; L slouches on his side, finger at his mouth. Watari stands prim and perfected in the midst of them.

_Ding._

Ding, slide, and he’s dragged out into the hall toward their base front entry. The door is held for the both of them. As the one before him approaches, excitement meets his huddled form. “Hey, Ryuzaki, you’re back! How did it go? Did you get any information on Namikawa, do you think he could be our guy?” Positive as ever, Matsuda cheers on their arrival. L continues his slink forward  until he’s amidst the whole group in the main screening room, offering only a back forth shake once of his head for the lot of them to deflate to.

Still, Matsuda bounces back with that same vigor. “Well, it was a good game to watch, at least. BayStars won, eight to three. And, _heh,_ the players weren’t-”

“The players weren’t the only ones to steal first base,” Ide says in dry exhaustion, chin in one palm propped up against the table. “You’ve been waiting for them to get back here for three hours so you could say that.”

Embarrassment colors Matsuda’s half-smiling face, though Light can’t be bothered with the jeering, too focused on ensuring that he and his father don’t lock eyes now. Something urges him to make a scene right here, _why Ryuzaki why would you do that?!,_ just to clear up the wicked fact of his power not present in the situation. He’s sure the others must understand that, regardless, wouldn’t they? L has more inexplicable eldritch behaviors than any person ever known to mankind. There’s got to be a reason behind it, a calculated one.

“Well, I’ll be going to bed, then,” suddenly breaks out amongst them, and L wastes not a second in moving toward the room’s exit.

Ukita tosses a wrist up toward his bewildered face. “It’s only seven PM, you’re really going to bed this early?”

“I didn’t even know he went to bed,” Mogi comments, quiet and observant.

Souichirou sighs behind his palms. They fold to the table to allow him a word. “It’s alright, we’re all exhausted from working so hard lately. Let Ryuzaki and Light get their rest, we’ll handle things for a while out here.”

It’s only another step on L’s part before Light must comply to following him, though he’d give a leg (or better yet, an arm) to be able to stay out here and work on the case with his father and the others. Instead, he allows his leash be tugged like an obedient mutt, cursing the day he’d ever met Ryūga Hideki at that entrance ceremony. On the way past the hall door bedrooms, one clicks open to place a tray of chocolate bonbons into L’s hands, who nods, and continues on forward for the last room at the hall’s close. They step inside together, L dropping himself heavily to the edge of a sofa, tray in the lap.

“Ryuzaki...” Light murmurs. Darkness strokes patterns on his face. “I want you to take the handcuffs off of me. Even if you do suspect me, this is ridiculous.”

By the time the sentiment has begun, L already has his cheek stuffed in candy, watching thoughtfully Light’s course unfold with a hand hanging dumbly in the air before his mouth. “I’m afraid I can’t do that just yet. Your chance of being involved in this case is at an all time high after today.”

“What do you mean?” His jaw tightens. “How could that even be possible? It’s like Misa said, I haven’t left your side in the last week.”

“Which is just exactly why Namikawa’s guest didn’t show, he was too busy on the other side of the stadium with his two dates for the evening.” The tray sets off to the side to allow his knees to be brought up. Light leers incredulity at him.

First clenched, head dropped, he trembles in his building fury. “That’s completely wrong. Ryuzaki, just admit it, you’re grasping at straws.”

With a contemplative hum, a nod bobs to Light’s surprise.

“Yes, you’re right,” L says in his drawl. “This case has been leading to dead ends at every turn lately. I’m not sure what exactly to go off of. To be honest with you, I’m depressed.”

“Depressed?” The fabric of his slacks hush against each other as he leans forward into a stance of power. Though it’s all fallen together as a shock, there’s nothing to hold him back from speaking his mind. “That’s no excuse for taking out your shortcomings on me. I want to go back to living normally, being able to go to class, being able to _shower_ on my own. I can’t take being chained to you every second. And that stunt you pulled at the game today- what the hell was that all about? Do you know how humiliating that was?”

“Did you want Namikawa to see your face, or didn’t you?” His cheeks puff outward with a sigh. “Besides, you should be thanking me for getting Amane off your back. As well as protecting my identity in the process. Were anyone watching that suspecting me of being L for any reason, they would expect him to be out for investigation purposes, not a date with his boyfriend.”

Grasping for breath, for _something,_ Light gawks there at him, finally lifts his arms wide and drops them back with a slap and a clink. “Do you even realize how little sense you’re making?!”

Slow and gradual. L turns at an agonizing pace to lift another bonbon into his mouth, chewing it in a contemplative bout of tire. “Well, like I said,” goes his smacking, half filled mouth. “I’m depressed.”

The fist that collides with his face certainly must help that.

L does not react so strongly as Light expects, or does not expect, or could foresee, because there’s nothing on his mind but anger and ache, the will to force motivation back into his bones by brute power. “Get yourself together, Ryuzaki! The rest of the task force is counting on you to lead us through this investigation. You can’t call yourself the world’s greatest detective if you let a little roadblock get in the way of- _GH!”_

Having his jaw uppercut by the bare bottom of a foot isn’t so high on his bucket list for a Friday night, but it’s happened regardless, knocked him back on his ass onto the bedroom floor for awe to overtake him. He shakes himself out of it enough to stand, dizzy, palm rubbing the bruised pang of his face as he ambles over toward the perpetrator.

For a while, he only stands there over him, breathing, collecting.

He lunges forward hard enough to knock the couch onto its back and L the same, knuckles hammering the sides of his head as the other’s unanticipated sense of strength kicks him upward in the ribcage. Bonbons scatter across the bedroom carpet.

Light’s coughing against the blow delivered to his middle, though L looms above him, a panther, a God, and he’s _whipped_ up to his feet likewise by a tug on the chain. It draws them near enough for breaths to mingle. The opportunity is taken to grip L by the front of his shirt, lifting it for better purchase, and at the same moment has the same done to his own, watching the other’s fist draw back by the elbow as if mirroring his, and the wind of it popping forward brushes his hair to twin the millisecond it’s halted by the knocks sounding on the bedroom door.

“Hey-! Ryuzaki, Light, are you guys fighting in there? I could hear the yelling and banging all the way down the hall!”

Knuckles still white round his collar, L tips into an expression of tight-teeth aggravation, brows low to growl out, “ _Stupid Matsuda…”_ beneath his breath.

Light stumbles backward once he’s dropped down. He grapples for a clean breath, scuppered by the dull pain in his ribs, face, hands.

“We’re fine,” Light calls through the door, deflecting all further attempts to assure it, a good minute of insistence on both sides before he listens for the muffled wash of oxfords fading down the hallway. Over one shoulder, his gaze snaps to L, crouched on the floor placing chocolates back onto the tray they’d flipped from.

A sleeve crosses his face, and so very much for a nice white sweater untouched by the rust stains of blood. Groaning, he pinches the bridge of his nose back to quell it. L trips forward at the other’s advance to sit on the righted sofa.

No one says anything. For a while. No one says anything.

He feels his wrist lift the _slightest_ bit, urging him to open his eyes to check just what has brought him to such far bounds. From his spot he sees only L’s back, shoulders digging forward like a dog burrowing for empty earth. Light sniffs, touching a finger to his nose and finding it deliver only paleness, so he’s sighs and sniffs again to readjust comfort. Comfort. An unfolded bunch of fabric is dropped to his lap.

A change of scenery, L sits to his right side this time, chain bundled up around their feet. Light peers to the gift. It’s all silent static. He picks it up at the corners to find it unfurls into a fresh washed white tee of long sleeves and loose neck. The shadows seem darker beneath L’s eyes. Ever cautious, Light begins to peel the dirtied sweater from his waist up over his head (hassling through feeding the sleeve through the interior space of the cuff, routine of each day twice now); muscles toned, sunkissed and taut within the fabric of the new shirt once he’s within it.

No one says anything. And time passes. Light sits on the very edge of the sofa, microwave dinner in his lap, as L lay unmoving on the bed, lazy typing of laptop keys the only noise aside from the train’s far off whistle in the nine o’clock horizon. No one says anything.

The sky is not yet rid of it’s deep vermilions, yet he finds himself weighted by exhaustion enough to drag himself toward the bathroom just leftward, eyeing across the room the way L’s wrist jounces up, down, up as he brushes his own teeth.

His eyes sting as they fall closed, the feeling of true _at last_ beyond them with his head hitting the pillow on the floor beside the bed and blankets spread fine below him. He feels somewhat of a prisoner sleeping this way, metallic burn on his wrist failing to debate that. Just as he goes to turn himself over, fingertips tickle the softness of his bangs. On instinct, he slaps them away, yet still shifts to glance up at the shadow looming above him.

L rests with his mouth tucked into one elbow and forearm slung atop the head, indolent, second arm tempting down over the bed’s edge to walk along Light’s cheek.

Gruff, Light throats out a noise, though his voice still sits low. “Cut it out, Ryuzaki…”

The fingers slide to push brunet from his forehead. Light grimaces at the touch, but does not make to refute it again.

“I think you’d be more comfortable up here.” His voice is lush like spun cotton, leaves that drip dew behind the rising sun. “I could sleep on the floor, if you’d like.”

The fading outdoor gleam shines off their eyes. Though the shades are parted slight, just enough to keep the moonlight company, like L likes, there’s no one else in this universe but them, they the pair who has become one.

Light sits up at the waist with knees bent and arms to rest over them. He looks at L, and L looks at him with his eyes he can’t stop describing.

In one lift, the mattress is creaking underneath new weight.


	6. Chapter 6

Light wakes up alone in bed.

It takes him a minute of sun on his face and fighting the tired aching of his bones, but he realizes the case is true, rubbing his fingers about his left wrist as if he’s missing an organ of some sort. The bed is cold. He stands up, blinks around, and wonders what’s supposed to be done with a day.

“Aw, jeez, Light, you too?” The table of the main room is packed around the border, toast and jam and tea cups being filled now by Watari’s circling care covering the surface. Ide tosses the chastising. “What, did you two just beat the hell out of each other all night?”

At the table’s head, a rolling chair from the long desk front has been wheeled over for L to perch within. Milk drips from the spoonful of cocoa cereal waiting between his bowl and mouth. Bruises are visible down the sides of his face in the morning shine. “As I said before, Light was demonstrating how to properly tackle a suspect.”

“I don’t want you trying that out on any real criminals,” Souichirou warns over spreading margarine on a toasted bun. “I mean that for you as well, Ryuzaki. There’s no sense in hurting yourself trying to do something reckless like that.”

Overhead, there’s a chuckle, and Watari straightens himself after filling Ukita’s mug with green tea. “It’s no use, Yagami-san. I’ve spent the last twenty years trying to get him to behave.”

A stride past draws black bedhead into a ruffling of hand, Watari vanishing out of sight short after. L munches his cereal with vague interest.

They decide mutually that it’s an impossible statement to follow without risk. Aizawa coughs into one hand and stirs up a discussion regarding last night’s trial and error. In its midst, with Light still standing in his quiet observing beside the table, just existing, yeah- the front entry slaps against the inside wall accompanying it, eight glances magnetized toward a shrill mouth, a zero inch waist, a sunshine attitude so early the rise.

“Good _mooorniiing_ , boys!” Her outfit today is pretty, Light thinks, with the way the lacy petticoats define her skirt’s full potential, contacts in as a striking red to match the carmine accents spun throughout. But- enough of that, they’ll all think he’s staring at her because he likes what’s under the designer clothes instead. “Ah, Light! Good, you’re here. And- aww, you two are matching shirts!”

Perhaps had he cared so much for his own attire as he has Misa’s, then he’d have thought more about changing the gifted pajama top before rejoining civilization. Surely, the others all pop their gazes at him. Mogi stifles a laugh in his hand. Arms folded across the chest anew, Light is only so grateful to her existence for its distraction of them all again now.

“Come on in, I promise these guys are so much fun.” Misa’s grin is dipped out into the hall behind her to beckon forth one hand the same. Light tilts his head to better catch who slips into the room upon it, and certainly, he needs the extra examining time. Standing behind Misa now, this new guest’s got to be over six feet. Hulking. Stunning. “These are my friends, that’s Mochi and Matsu, and Monchichi and Yukita and Idede, and Light’s dad, and that’s Light, of course. And Ryuzaki. He’s the one that likes cookies.” Misa huffs a breath, lifting her arms out beside her. “Everybody, this is Rem! My bestie.”

Light has difficulty discerning if she one hundred percent is not a warrior plucked from history itself. She’s a gorgeously handsome woman, tall and formidable, broad at the shoulders and dark all over, a deep bronze of summertime glow, lips plump with violet color, hair expanded in a thick bushel of soft curls. She’s got a shaggy white coat on, and gold hoops in her ears and rings in her bottom lip (yet wears them so distinguished she looks nowhere near streetpunk ratty), all that and all that he could go on rambling another decade over. The impression she’s made on him, walking inside in her chunky heels and shy look in the eye, leaves him in a stupor.

“Hello,” greets her low pitched smoke of a voice. Several hands raise into waves, short ones that spell out their apprehension. More than anything it is, he’d guess, the doing of the juxtaposition, a dainty little princess with a grim reaper over her shoulder, both exquisite in their own personal expressions.

“We stopped by on our way to Aoyama to see some friends. Light, you should totally come with us!” Her enthusiasm dips enough to say, “Oh, and you too, Ryuzaki, since you guys are kinda...conjoined at the moment.”

In tandem, they each lift their innermost wrists, Misa gasping delight to see the disconnect.

“Yay! Now Light can come hang out with me without any interruptions!” She claps her hands together. “Unless, of course, your incredible brain is needed here today for the investigation. Then I’ll just have to stay here with you instead.”

Annoyance seems to flash through Rem’s eyes, what he can see of them beneath her side parted bang. He glances back to Misa. And before he’s any chance to reply, she cups her face with a gasp. “Oh, wait, that’s right! Rem could help you guys with stuff. She’s got to be the second smartest person in the whole entire world- that’s how I figured out who you were in the first place, Light. Rem worked so hard to find you for me, she’s such a good friend!”

Misa’s arms have snaked around one of Rem’s, who’s kept her hands in her coat pockets and sunk her pinkening face deeper into the hood lining of. Light watches L’s feet writhe against his chair.

“I...can’t allow this investigation to be opened up to any more civilians,” Souichirou says, but Misa has her argument at the ready, “But you _need_ Rem, trust me. She’s more than just good at figuring things out. She’s a real clairvoyant!”

“Misa,” Rem murmurs, keeping herself demure from the others, “You know that isn’t true.”

Misa’s pout gleams with cherry lip gloss. “But it is true, Rem! You were able to figure out who Muda is all on your own!”

Collectively, the room finds hush.

Breaths can be heard rattling. It is Matsuda who finally breaks it with a slap of hands to the table and a jump to standing. “No way, for real?! You think you know who the _real Muda is?”_

Rem goes dark. Her shoulders pinch together more tightly. “I...have my own suspicions. I understand you have all been secretly investigating high ranking members of the Yotsuba group. I want to tell you, you are in the correct place.”

Stars shimmer in Matsuda’s eyes, Ukita setting his fork down to gaze on, Souichirou leaning more toward L to whisper behind a hand, “Do you believe we can trust her?”

Cereal fills his mouth another spoonful. L chews. Light trains his gaze directly upon him. Rem clenches her hands within her pockets, never meeting a look her way for fear of taking her eyes off Misa’s crooning movements. L chews.

Once the tension has boiled the room raw to its bones, L swallows the bite, and with a dead weight in his tone, shrugs out, “I’ve got nothing to lose at this point.”


	7. Chapter 7

Cleared- the table’s cleaned off of all its happenings. Another chair is wheeled over from the desk for Light to cram himself in beside L at the head of things; Mogi and Souichirou stand intently above to give up their places for the two guests to sit. Every focus tunes in on her. Fingertips prod L’s leant in mouth.

“I first came across them in December of last year,” Rem begins to work her tale. “As...embarrassing as this may sound, I was in the area in search of my cat. He ran off around this time.”

Light cringes, though supposes it’s his best route not to interrupt at such a time. His hands fidget below the table.

“There was nothing I liked about the men of this group. One of them in particular struck me as a truly vile human being, and it is for that reason I thought of him when the first murders occurred among members of their top rival company.” Dramatics pause her, draw her eyes shut downward. “Higuchi Kyousuke,” she says at last, to which a gasp pours from Matsuda, a low grunt from Aizawa as he leans inward to listen.

“I cannot say for certain that he is Muda, though I would place a seventy to eighty percent probability upon it. He contacted Misa sometime in January to ask her to model for their advertisements, then continued to harass her for private meetings and lewd photographs. He has no understanding for not receiving what he wants, I would not put it past him to go so far as to kill for his desires.”

Leaning back straight, Light scoffs out, “Misa, is that really true? Why didn’t you tell us this before?”

All eyes fall on her shrunken back form. She presses two pointer fingers together the shiest measure. “Well...to be honest with you, Light, I felt a little bad about telling on him. He didn’t seem dangerous, just a lonely guy who didn’t understand I wasn’t interested in him. Kinda like Matsu.”

A _thunk_ signals Matsuda’s head dropping to the table top, but the attention flashes back to L in a split. “This means you know what he looks like?”

“Course I do. I even have a picture he sent me.” Her phone flips open in her hands, fiddling with it a moment before displaying a photograph for them all the crowd around.

Broad, chiseled, aged, rough. Four shirt buttons are popped in a dip of flesh exposed down his chest in the image. Light can’t decide what more he loathes, Misa’s idiocy or this man’s revolting face.

“We definitely have enough evidence to arrest him,” Ukita asserts. “Even if he ends up not being the real Muda, it’s still better to be safe than sorry.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t just show up and tell him he’s under arrest. If he’s truly a dangerous criminal, that would put all of us at risk,” determines Ide.

Mogi suggests, “Another undercover mission?”, answered by Ukita with flared nostrils, “And how many times have we gone through that and failed? We have to catch him while we can, I’ll go in myself if I have to!”

“One last undercover operation may not be a bad idea, now that we know for certain who we’re after,” L breaks calmly in. “If he’s so infatuated with Amane, it would be simple to use her as a sort of bait-”

“I won’t allow it!”

The perfect twin to their proclamations is perhaps uncanny. Light and Rem blink, stare forward to each other for a good half minute, until Light shakes himself out. “Ryuzaki, you can’t just use people how ever you see fit. It’s unethical.”

His tongue swipes the front of his top teeth, though he remains silent enough for Rem to input, “I have no business judging your decisions, but I will not allow you to involve Misa in such a dangerous operation. If she were to die under your watch, L Lawliet, you have my word that I will kill you as well.”

“... _Lawliet_ ,” Light whispers, though is overshadowed by his father’s barking, “That’s a serious threat upon police personnel-!”

“It’s alright.” L circles his arms around both shins. “I understand that kind of love.”

The room is dark as ever. Rem seems to be shadowed by the thick scarlet ooze of guilt.

“Nevertheless,” he continues in a sigh, “There’s no need to worry for Amane’s safety. Were she to comply to this mission, it would be only to lure Higuchi into admitting what he’s done, nothing more. Having that on tape would be...an instant victory.”

Before Rem has the chance to again refute it, Misa’s on her feet to shout out, “I’ll do it.”

“ _Misa-_ ”

“It’s okay, Rem,” promises the conviction in her narrowed stare. “I trust Light, and I know he would never want to put me in danger. When I said I’d do anything I can to help him, I meant it.”

Intensity tightens between their gazes, not in disagreement, not in refusal, not in toxicity. It cuts apart by Rem’s glare turned down the table.

“If you are insistent on doing this, then act quickly,” she demands to L. “Muda always strikes on a Saturday.”

What Light would call _shock_ manifests in L’s expression. One bolt hits him up from his seat, orders flying sharp from his mouth, the rest of the task force nodding to him as their highest commander. Light himself, he remains in his spot, taut all over to observe L’s every motion. The next one comes as a snap of his neck down toward him, making Light flinch back, yet keeps his stare steady.

Misa shouts something in the tone of reignited joy, something about needing to go home and change, real quick she’ll be quick, and he hears bits of a phone call saying something big’s come up, she’ll get coffee with them soon to make up for it; Rem stands behind her with her back facing the group of them all, whilst around them buzz the rest of the task force in adrenalized gusto.

It it there that they remain, in that state of _rush,_ all the way through to Light and L perched in their spots before the surveillance monitors, because it’s been an hour now, and Mogi and Misa’ve both been wired just for an extra measure, Matsuda and Ide manning the headsets to listen in on them whilst Ukita and Aizawa manage together the signal from Higuchi’s car. The sound crackles as well through the monitor speakers, listening now to Misa gab on in the back seat whilst Mogi chauffeurs her about, and Light wonders just how long it’ll take one of the four to realize they’re the toddlers placed in front of the television whilst their mother does the dishes. That mother is perched in his seat, thumb to the lips, watching. Light could admire his dedication. Instead, he sips his coffee.

When Misa steps out of the car, he can see from Mogi’s body cam signal the lines of her thong through her skirt, so he knows she’s smarter than he’s thus far noticed. She turns to wink and beam up toward him. “And remember, Mochi,” crackles through the speakers. Her fingers trace a smile across her mouth. The next caught audio is of a voice they’ve never met, though determine it’s Mogi who then shouts back with the strain of a grin, “Alright, Misa Misa! You’ll be great in there! Do your best!”

From there, they watch her from the perspective of Mogi’s lapel. It’s no hassle to get inside the Yotsuba building, a push and a prance, and she saunters right up to the front secretary with gusto. “Good morning! I’m Amane Misa, here to see Mister Kyousuke, please? I totally love your lipstick color, by the way.”

What they can see of the secretary is muffled. Light concludes a timid refusal, for Misa goes on with a pout in her tone. “But he asked me to meet him here, we’re supposed to go on a date. Maybe he forget, oh, you know how dumb men are sometimes. I can just go up to his office and remind him myself. That’s such a cute top, by the way, is that chiffon?”

L leans forward in his seat. There’s a hesitation between Misa’s delivered line and her move to slip over toward the elevators, though there finds no chase after her. Well and good, yet L chews his finger with a rough dissatisfaction. “She’s supposed to be leading him to the car…”

Light glances halfway toward him, but focuses to the screens quickly after. Souichirou’s in a seat between them, set behind just a touch, mouth resting in one hand as his thin eyes examine the situation before them. The monitor flashes through several floors of elevator music. Light leans to rest an elbow on his thigh, mouth to a palm, determined.

Once the doors ding open, Misa skips out into the pristine office corridor. It’s a while of her heels echoing on the tile before they’re strangled in frustration to her words- “Okay, Mochi, you better stay out here. This is private stuff.”

“B- But wait, Amane-san-”

Two wide doors slap shut, and that’s the last they see.

“Switch to the feed from Misa’s microphone,” L wastes not a second to demand. Before Light has the shot, his father’s hands whip forward to finger about the controls. _“-drop in to see you, since it’s been a while. I’m suuure you’ve missed me, mhmh.”_

An exhale relaxes the seven in tandem.

They listen to the scuffle of what can only be desk drawers, paperwork. _“Well, I’m surprised,”_ a gruff voice coughs, _“But you picked a bad time, I’ve got important things to do today.”_

 _“What sort of important things? Businessman stuff? You know, I’ve always thought businessmen were really hot.”_ From her silky tone, Light can almost visualize the way she’s got her legs on show, shoulders pressed inward to accentuate the low neckline of her shirt.

Higuchi snarls some kind of laughter. _“Not anything you’d understand, sweetheart. If you hang around a while, I’ll be pleased to fill you in afterward, while we’re on our date.”_

Heels click forward as Misa says, _“I don’t think I’ll have time to wait that long. Oh, I know! Can I come with you while you do your businessman stuff? I promise I won’t be a distraction- pretty please? It’d be so cool to see you in action like that.”_

Something of teeth click sounds. When Higuchi speaks again, he’s twice as clear and twice as close. L’s mouth purses tightly.

 _“You’ve got quite the sudden interest, darling. It wouldn’t have anything to do with this, would it?”_ Suddenly, Matsuda out lets a shrill gasp and flings the headset from his ears- though none can blame him. The sound that trails through the overhead speakers is a scare of abrupt volume, scratching, blundering as though grating upon skin. _“What’ve you got here? Wearing a microphone, eh?”_

Amber eyes bloom full round. Light sits straight again, gripping his knees, pulse a new hammering.

 _“That? Oh-”_ Misa pauses, perhaps her own collection of mind. _“I just came from filming a scene, the director must have forgotten to take it off me. Here.”_ Another wisping grating cacophony, a door creaked open, a hard clack as if they’ve been aboard a ship just crashed down to surface. The door slams again.

And that’s it.

“Misa…” Light struggles with himself. Before any brash decisions, he calms to watch L place one finger forward upon the transceiver button. “Mogi.”

_“Yes, Ryuzaki, I’m here.”_

L wets his lips. “She just threw her mic out of the room.”

_“Affirmative.”_

Collectively, the force seems to groan, though can only sweat the tension of the moment as they observe on, bated.

“I want you to get as close to the doors as you can,” L instructs. “Perhaps we can pick up some of what’s being said.”

 _“Right,”_ Mogi agrees, and the audio feed is switched again to his body surveillance.

“Ryuzaki, I think we should order them to try and get out of there before anything dangerous happens,” is Light’s suggestion. “If Higuchi doesn’t believe Misa, and realizes she’s trying to set him up-“

“If he suspects her of working with the police, there’s no chance he’ll kill her. That would be a dead give away,” L says, then mumbles, “Literally.”

The quip is lost on him. He hasn’t the chance to interject again, only grits his teeth as his father supplies, “I have to agree with Light. As it stands, both Amane and Mogi are in danger of becoming Muda’s next victim if we don’t act carefully.”

L hums in that thoughtful little way of his that Light can’t stand. “You agree with Light, and haven’t considered my point of view at all. That isn’t like you.”

Stress flashes across him. “Out of anyone in the world, I respect you most, Ryuzaki, but there are some things I disagree with you on.”

“Yes, it’s only fair,” he says. “Unless you’re being manipulated by Muda to go against me.”

“What?” father and son shout in unison. Behind them, Aizawa growls, “Ryuzaki, listen to yourself! You’re completely paranoid!”

“Paranoid, or simply testing all possibilities.” Halfmoon cat’s eyes turn toward Souichirou. “I of course am not placing blame on you. My initial evaluations of the task force assured me that none of you are Muda, and I have entrusted you with my life. However, I must be honest and say I’ve had my suspicions about Light throughout this entire investigation.” He faces back forward. “It’s true that I was interested in your abilities, but I didn’t invite you here just for fun.”

“Ryuzaki, with all due respect, I will not accept your accusations that my son is a mass murderer!”

“What the hell, Ryuzaki?!” that son bursts out. “I thought when you took the handcuffs off, it meant you didn’t suspect me anymore!”

On his feet he’s lunged. Screens cast a shadow glow along his flesh, trembling with the hot desire of rage. All the while, L makes no move to reciprocate an emotion. “It’s not that I want to, it’s that straight months of perfect behavior and an interest in _eliminating_ what you deem as injustice- well, one can only put two and two together.”

If he feels the sting of Light’s glaring, rugged breaths, clenching muscles, there is no indication.

“You think I’m Muda because I’m _perfect?”_

Upward, L inches his stare, clutching his kneecaps, breathing silent waves. And in a swallow, his mouth stretches into an eerie, golden smile.

Knuckles clap forward to wipe it clean off.

“Ah-! R-Ryuzaki!”

“What the hell’s the matter with you, Light?!”

The task force lose their collected dispositions all at once to jump to their commander’s aid; Matsuda crouches by L’s side, where he’s lain in a heap on the dark tile floor. Aghast. Light huffs heavy, heavy breaths.

Gradual motions cast L up to his forearms, head still ducked downward to clench inhales within him. “I’m getting tired of this game,” L husks. “Yet still, an eye for an eye, my friend.”

He’s up in a flash to launch himself atop Light, who stumbles, fumbles, yet without the cuff of pain does their brawl close off shortly, L’s hands poised on his throat but remaining there without constriction. More pressing matters draw their eyes, that of the sparkling voice broken through the front monitors.

_“I did it, Mochi! Hurry, let’s get out of here so I can go tell Light the good news!”_

“Good news?” Light blinks at the screen, choking back the wonder once he’s yanked gruffly away by the shirt back by one of Aizawa’s hands. Said captor grunts into a scowl, yet says null of the world outside the new happenings.

Cool and calculated, L pulls his chair out by the back to perch in it whilst rubbing a knuckle against his swelling lip corner. “They should be returning within the next twenty minutes. If Amane has delivered, we could move in to make our arrest shortly after.”

“And just like that, he goes back to work…” Matsuda rises warily from his panic.

Placed offset, Light keeps to himself- he must, for there now can be no individual being but only a force united under common ground, daring not breathe as they eye the front screens like a Sunday football fourth quarter. But Light keeps to himself, knows not a move can be made without its dimensions analyzed beyond analysis, keeps to himself all the way to being pinpointed in arms thrown violent around his middle.

“I’m back!” Light flinches in her hold until it relents, twisting around with the rest to face her new. He keeps his surprise contained to see where Misa has reappeared, Rem has as well, standing over her shoulder, hands in the pockets, eyes dark. A phantom. Misa goes giddy.

“I did everything I was told,” she nods, “I got Higuchi to admit everything- he even said that he’s Kira!”

Pounding, pounding silence.

“Kira?” Ukita says. “Who’s...Kira?”

Her head tilts to rest at a fingertip. “Oh, well I couldn’t just come right out and ask him if he’s Muda, but he did say that he’s _Kira,_ and that he’s ‘bringing the world to prosperity’.”

“Kira…” Ide brings his finger to his mouth in thought.

“A copycat killer?” says Aizawa.

“Potentially, we could be dealing with a self-proclaimed successor to Muda,” Souichirou deduces with grim spirit.

Simultaneous, unconscious, all eyes rest upon L. His face is stern, yet beneath the surface, Light can tell the heat of exhilaration threatens. “None of that matters until we can hear it ourselves.”

Their connection proves solid with Misa’s nod of understanding, no hesitation present, the reach into her purse to flip open a cell phone.

 _“If you’re really so interested,”_ their target snarls, “ _then I see no reason you can’t be involved. You’ll be my partner in all of this, of course.”_

Behind her, Rem’s nostrils flare.

_“I guess my dirtiest secret in life...is that I am Kira.”_

Steel tense focus remains from all of them to the tape. Misa’s voice is next to muffle out from it. _“Kira? Who’s that?”_

 _“Kira, sweetheart, is the one being who will carry Yotsuba and the entire world to prosperity all on his own. Kira will be God, and you’ll be His wife. Starting today, all of His subordinates will be eliminated,”_ and his tone smokes into a smirking as he finishes, _“just as soon as I can get to my meeting with Hatori.”_

The echo of Misa’s phone clicking shut reverberates throughout the room.

Matsuda is the first to react.

“Then- Then that settles it! We have to go down there and arrest Higuchi before Hatori is killed!”

“No,” L is quick to say, studying the world before him with glossed eyes, a thumb to the mouth.

Hunching forward, Matsuda grapples after, “N...No? What do you mean-?”

“If you’re planning on waiting until he’s killed, just to prove that Higuchi really is who he says he is,” growls Light, “then forget it. We won’t allow an innocent person to killed just to-”

“Hatroi won’t die,” assures L, leaving the rest to sputter.

“Ryuzaki, how can you be certain?” Souichirou asks.

The answer is far too intricately simple for anyone’s liking. “I’m certain, because Higuchi is not Muda.”

“How could he not be?” Light begs him, then grits his molars deep. “Don’t tell me it’s because you still think _I’m_ Muda.”

“Light, be mature about this,” Souichirou suddenly clips. “While I don’t like the accusations against you either, you cannot blame Ryuzaki for simply doing his job.”

The reproaching tone, _disappointment,_ almost- it breaks him from the inside out, glancing over to his father, shoulders pinching inward as he offers a quick short nod. Being reprimanded in front of his colleagues, as if he were a _child_ strikes him with humiliation to his core, though shakes it off in the face of goddamn it all, his father is _right._ He’ll go to hell and back fighting L’s suspicions of him, but at the end of all things, there is no title granted of world’s greatest detective without being a thorough investigator. If he’s honest- he respects L and what he stands for, just as Souichirou had said, even if he cannot withhold disagreements from time to time...to time to time to time to time.

If he’s honest, L is the most irritating thing he’s ever met in his life, but he respects him, and they’re almost _friends_ after so long at each other’s hip.

“No,” L says, muffled by one finger, “With this new crucial detail, it couldn’t possibly be you either.”

“You’ve decided it that quickly?” Ide awes. “What was it- the crucial detail? Was it on the recording?”

Misa _shrills_ a cheer. “My undercover work cleared Light as a suspect, I can’t believe it! I get to save him just like he saved me.”

Despite her, attention lingers still on L. As though disinterested, he breathes a sigh.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Matsuda decides to interject. Eyes shift toward his solid expression. “Higuchi isn’t Muda, like you said, but he did admit to being _Kira-_ and like we figured out before, Muda has people working under him doing his dirty work. That could be what Higuchi’s doing, which means he’d have a direct connection to Muda. And-And saying he’s going to eliminate all _his_ subordinates, it’s easy to assume Kira is right beneath Muda in power, maybe even on the same level.”

“Matsuda…” Aizawa begins, though can only trail off at that.

The others stand in their same pools of ankle deep wonder, until it is that L adds in his own direction. “You’re almost there,” he grants, something of a pride in his throat. “It’s a foible in his statement on eliminating those subordinates.”

Persistence of glory dances down Light’s spine. A foible, a flaw. Something that would insist upon his own innocence as well as Higuchi Kyousuke’s. His precision pulsates. Then, he’s immortal.

 _“Starting today,”_ Light repeats in less than a breath. All at once, the room is constricted by understanding, gasping, nonplus.

In his seat, L curls his fingers. “Exactly.”

Placid enough, yet Light meets no mimic, grinning a bold measure across his face as he speaks with his hands and the life of the whole world at his lips. “Higuchi can’t be Muda, since the murders in the Muda case started back in January.” And here’s the golden apple, the bite that rushes youth upon him. “And if I were Muda, I’d never suddenly order Higuchi to start killing, because I’d _know_ we’ve been investigating him, and he’d be caught instantly.”

“Wait, hold on,” Matsuda says, losing his streak of smarts to the confused stretch of his mouth. “So...Light isn’t Muda, because Higuchi is just starting his killing today, he said, as Kira, who we think is working under Muda, but not actually is Muda himself.”

“And if Kira were caught, he’d only lead the police that much closer to Muda,” Ukita goes on.

With a hand on his chin, Mogi grimaces against thought. “Even though Higuchi isn’t Muda, doesn’t what he said still make him a killer? And shouldn’t that mean we arrest him?”

“Hatori is going to die,” Rem suddenly says, reminds everyone of her presence in jumps. “Just because Higuchi is not Muda, that does not mean he will not kill.”

“Not if his God tells him not to,” L responds with a blank look.

Everyone _waits_. Not a word exchanges.

L turns to look upward at Light, electricity surging between their eyes.


	8. Chapter 8

A glance through Amane Misa’s cell phone contacts. A voice warping transceiver. A will kept solid as the pulse in his neck.

The camera surveillance of Higuchi Kyousuke’s empty car flicks along one monitor. He’s iron- Light is, in his stance before them, legs stark long beneath and daring not quiver. Misa’s over his one shoulder, at the ready, red hot over the face with determination and ardor. Rem stands beside her, unmoving. The remaining task force keep themselves lesser than rustling leaves.

Light clears his throat, listens to the dial tone in his ear before the cue: _“Hello, what is it?”_

His resolve does not falter. “Kira.”

At once, the other line loses its curtness to adopt a stutter, a veneration. _“...Hello? M-”_ then, in a whisper just hardly kept, “ _Is it you_ _?”_

“Yes. It’s me,” Light chokes upon. “I’ve disguised my voice so that this call will in no way be traceable back to me.”

 _“I understand,”_ Higuchi replies on instant, _“What is it that you’d like from me?”_

L watches Light as if he were an ant beneath glass. His own eyes do not flicker downward. “You’re on your way to the meeting, correct?” After an affirmative, “I want you to cancel it. I have other arrangements for you today.”

The echo of footsteps clacking tile halt on the other end. _“Other arrangements?”_ The phone sounds a shuffling. _“But this was supposed to be my first big step toward working alongside you, taking care of the rest of the Yotsuba group and being given your power.”_

“You will be,” Light says. “But I want you to prove yourself to me first.”

 _“Anything,”_ Higuchi breathes, and Light cinches, “I want you to kill Amane Misa.”

In the corner of his eye, Light can see the hold kept on one of her hands tighten, to which Misa turns her nose toward Rem and nods, reassurance.

This time around, immediacy stalls, giving Light the chance to continue, “If you prove to me that you are willing to go to any lengths, even killing the one you love, in order to show your true devotion to me, then I will grant you my power as promised.”

L does not breathe. Ukita, Ide, Mogi- all with that same stun.

 _“...I’ll do as you say,”_ Higuchi ensures, and his footsteps pick back up before halting at another command.

“I’ve captured her,” Light informs him, then holds the receiver outward, as planned, switches the voice disguise off for her in clarity to ring out, “Somebody, _please-_ I don’t know where I am. Please, somebody, help me-!”

With the phone pulled back to his cheek, Light flicks the setting back again before ordering the most worrisome of his script. His hand flexes by his hip. “Come to our usual meeting place, I’m waiting for you here.”

Bated breath. Flexing fingers.

Higuchi inhales against the receiver. Light can hear him sweat.

 _“I’m on my way,”_ he says, and the call is dead.

He cannot yet move for fear of implosion. There’s a quick while of it, standing rigid, numb, in a sense, though not so much as a timid fool overplays any camera flash. Light gathers himself, because he’s Yagami Light, and he’s a goddamned good policeman.

“That jerk! I can’t believe he really agreed to kill me,” Misa huffs, hands on her waist. Touch warms her shoulder, Rem’s form now of that reassurance, and she bears no further an ounce of ire.

“There’ll be time to worry about that later.” Laze filters away to L’s standing pose before the table, pacing every so often to observe every last inch of every last screen, though certain in his form to watch the left side monitor once it flashes with life. Higuchi’s in his car, the first glimpse they’ve had of him this way with the audio transmitter now _freshly_ accompanied by video that feeds right back to them. A job perfected in haste. Seat belt yanks across his chest, and he guns it hard down the street ahead. The car behind wheels forth to continue choking on his exhaust.

“Okay.” At the smoothness of what’s they’ve blueprinted, Light finds lax in sitting himself down. “Dad and Aizawa just have to follow him now. All according to plan so far.”

“And Matsuda has to stop being stupid long enough to fix his body camera,” Ide comments, noting the grayed out screen in the bottom right. Ukita and Mogi groan along with him.

L taps a fingertip below his nose. “It doesn’t matter. Yagami is competent enough to know what to do, even without me monitoring him.”

Light flicks his eyes to the left, draws them back forward when they are not met. Intensity sketches the profile of L’s face.

 _“Hatori, it’s me,”_ suddenly wades from the audio of the car. _“I won’t be making it to our meeting today. Consider yourself lucky…”_ A smirk forms on Higuchi’s face, drops swiftly afterward. _“Don’t ask such stupid questions! I’m busy today, with much more important things to take care of than you.”_

“He thinks I’m important…” Jubilation nearly sits in Misa’s tone. The task force groan into their hands again.

Fingers clutch forward into a steeple, elbows to the table as he steadies himself so. Light bears a vibrancy along his teeth. If this works out, they’ll have slashed through the greatest mass killing spree in Japan. He cannot begin to count all that is riding on this victory, and on his father, most especially, in his position now as commander to his army of backup for what’s to come. Someday that will be him. Someday he’ll stress his hair gray and his heart tight, but no criminal will stand between he and his goals. He wears the Yagami name as a badge of honor. It’ll be his all on every last line.

Hook to salmon, he’s pulled from the reverie. There’s pressure molding against his shoulders, and he’s close to brushing them away before thinking better of it, because Misa’s hands don’t feel like this, not so long and limber and calming. He does not glance back, because it feels good, and he’s got work to do. Palms rub up his back, then up again to massaging either shoulder, and L never once takes his eyes off the screens.

Both car rides are silent on their respective surveillance, both sharing that deadly edge for two antitheses. Misa wrings her hands in her lap as the anxiety builds with every new moment void of action.

The engine of Higuchi’s car fades to a halt.

Anticipation gleams in every eye.

He steps out to the curb, evading the view of the wire camera as the door slams behind him. Wind churns about the ground. They no longer can keep a keen look there, switching focus instead to the grayed out panel rightward. After several marching seconds, the first noise all the way sounds in a muffled whisper, undecipherable yet distinguishable as Matsuda from his perch in the back seat. Something shuffles afront him. Then, with pulse in every throat, the doors of the car all kick open, and steps rush the pavement beneath.

Light keeps himself as steadied as possible. The hands on his shoulders have paused, yet remain resting there on him, a weight he so desperately clings to the feel of now, in this spiraling smolder. He listens to the raspy noises of sprinting slack on slack, breaths that soon begin to _huffhuffhuff_ before altogether lost for a freeze. For a moment, there is distant ambiance. Nothing. A scraping, a tilt, and the screen is a full upside down view of Matsuda’s flushed worry face, heaving breaths from the nose, before the camera clips back into place on his breast pocket, this time around with the world clear before them, sound tenfold more crisp as he rushes forward to catch Aizawa and Souichirou’s fading forms.

The area he can see is unrecognized to Light. Concrete jungle, a classic of the Tokyo area, covered by concrete and nightfall. Steps slap to the ground further feet before the officers all round one corner, and Higuchi’s just ahead, far enough to keep smart distance yet near enough to spot, to observe like the rat of the lab, to clench in upon once they _know._ Matsuda swallows hard and blows his breaths beneath him. Aizawa’s voice is picked up aside it murmuring, _“It looks like he’s heading toward that warehouse.”_

Light feels his heart throb against his ribs. Stardust collects on his lashes. This is it. This is why he’s alive.

In one sudden sprint, the view beams forward again. L watches on with vim behind the eyes. This is it.

The warehouse door kicks open.

Headquarters is deafened by silence. Then, in one _rush,_ he’s back to reality, listening to his father’s fierce war shout- _“Japanese Police Force! You are under arrest for suspicions of involvement in the Muda case!”_

Everything is quiet.

The hands on his shoulders squeeze just once.


	9. Chapter 9

Rain warps the summertime into a chill where she would never dare most recent, sweater weather, sopping socks, whiplash for hairdryers. But its kind on the inside, just to watch it roll down the window glass. A fire could roar the hearth and be thought none of. Timid puppy bliss. _I love you_ calls the breeze through her flowers, _I love you_ says the skyline in its heartfelt drench.

He knocks only twice on the wood of the door.

There’s nothing to it. It’s dark in the midday, placid with the hush of rainfall so endless and labyrinthine. Before he can knock again, and not that he would so much so, there’s a shadow crept closeby him. Watari steps gently beside to grasp the knob and push the entry open, to which Light offers him a stare, then dips a nod of gratitude before stepping forward. It shuts again behind him. Practiced.

“...Ryuzaki?” His vision dilates into adjustment to the pitch gray room. All of the curtains have been cinched closed, only the most vague pets of natural light through the sheerness to light the path toward the bed, and L, L is sprawled out there atop it, on his back, a million miles long and a million miles away. Light stays put in the doorway, soft hum of the rain around them still, waiting for L to glance up to him.

He never quite does, not in the way of full acknowledgement, only an actual glance, fleeting yet slow, back to focused on the cookie in his left hand. Crumbs pepper the corner of his mouth, Light can see once he approaches closer at last. He’s the absolute picture of undignified. Light stays.

When Light speaks, L’s eyes do not move up from examining the creme center of his half eaten sweet. “Hey, what are you doing in here?” Seems a stupid question- it’s his bedroom, true, and he can picture that sort of snide answer from him, so he caters to his own health. “I came back from the bathroom and you were just...gone.”

“A lot can happen to an investigation in that short a time.” His fingertip flicks the top of the cookie away from the rest. No higher boredom has ever hailed his eyes. “...Six days, and he still refuses to talk.” L carries no inflection, mere fact, a short blink. “He said he’d reveal Muda’s identity if Eraldo Coil left the room. So...here I am.”

Light studies him a moment, then asks, “Do you really think that will work?”

His tongue presses flat to lick the creme away. “No.” In comes the rest of the cookie to crunch in his teeth as he continues, “But I’m tired.”

Having followed the same routine for weeks on no end, for failures and plans that have only one hamartia that leads them back to the start, yes, Light’s tired too. Exhausted enough to amble over, take a place on the foot of the bed. He sits there a while, he himself and the other otherwise, elbows rested to his thighs to lean forward in half, and be tired.

A foot presses gently enough into his lumbar to be noticed. “You’ll ruin your back sitting like that.”

There is no light to glow golden around him, when he glances over his shoulder, looking, not searching, but looking. Light laughs only enough to form himself a smirk, and straightens just to lay backward fully. His legs stay bent over the side. It’s enough.

“Let’s hope this case wraps up soon,” he sighs, but L only stares off sidelong.

“I don’t care either way. In fact, I prefer things the way they are.” The comment earns a confused little noise from the back of the other’s throat. If it were brighter, he’d swear L was ethereal. “I’m never bored when I’m around you. Sometimes I almost think I miss the weight at my wrist.”

 _....Is he seriously saying this to me?_ Light can’t bare to look at him nor anywhere else.

“I’m sure we’ll still work together after this case is solved,” he assures. “Without so many lives on the line.”

“Hmm…” L offers, noncommittal, wipes crumbs off on his shirt and leaves the hand to hang there.

They rest there in that pitch black honey glow, the hush of rainfall and string plucks neither hear but swear is the sound of peace manifested in the way L moves, the way Light breathes, the way together they _are_. He’s never bored when he’s with him. A reversible jacket. A two way street.

It isn’t so complex, Light will promise himself. Just existing. They’re there; there they’re. There. They’re they’re they’re.

“I should get back to work,” Light says, sitting upright with a _fluff_ of brunet against his head. And he laughs, lids soft. “I need to make sure I’m on top of things, right?”

“Yes,” is the answer. “Though, do you find it likely that Higuchi would be more apt to talk with another person around to listen?”

“Uh- no, I guess not…” He’s caught off guard that way. A slip in composure. He shakes it off, because he can. “You’re saying I should stay?”

L keeps himself stilled, torpid as ever. “Trust your judgement as a detective,” he grants, then does drag himself upward, knees come to bend up and rest his arms across, glancing to Light with a burn up his flesh. He can feel how L’s fingers would come beneath his jawline, cup it and keep that stare steady as he husks out his hot baritone, _“Yes, stay here with me”,_ and his lips will be twice as soft as they were at the baseball game and they’ll taste of saccharine. And then he thinks he’s watched far too many Ryūga dramas over Sayu’s shoulder in the living room.

How stupid of him.

The rain pours no harder nor lesser, yet Light finds it of sudden interest to listen in again. His judgement as a detective tells him this investigation needs as many hands on deck as can clap, yet his judgement as someone who’s struggling to breathe in this moment tells him it’s no bother to suffocate. But he is, he’s perfectly asphyxiated by fixation, and if they’ve any hope of bending Higuchi into culprit shaped origami, he needs to be there. He wants to. His slacks are fine ironed khaki as they lift him to stand.

“I should get back,” he insists again, and L nods to him, no emotion to the left or right palpable from him. Light almost wishes disappointment would run cross his features.

“You’ll make a good L someday, then,” he says. A gawking comes from his step away.

“Ryuzaki...You don’t really mean that.”

L looks upward to him, cotton in the eyes. “I do wonder whether you’d rather step into your father’s shoes or mine once we’re gone.” Hushing and humming. Darkness all over. “I’ve spent a good portion of my life training possible successors. But I’m not a trait one can be taught. You have to...have it.”

Breathless. Maple leaves sway through his lungs, and his lips are marmalade and this life is chardonnay. “...Thank you, Ryuzaki.” Though his fingers clench, a laugh folds from him. “Don’t keep talking like you’re going to die anytime soon, though. Maybe I could be the next L, but not for a long while.”

A lack of response pins him for sickness. Eventual, gradual, there comes a nod that Light grabs up and shoves in his pocket to keep before he turns for the door again, hall light blinding from the sliver it creaks open. He shuts it behind him for courtesy, and shakes himself awake, and walks back toward the main room again, and stands, and watches.

“Hey, Light, you’re back,” Matsuda greets. The others pick up their heavy stares to drop on him, his brow line tightening to ask, “What’s going on?”

“He...fell asleep,” Ide mutters. On the monitor, he glances to see the broadcast of Higuchi’s confinement room, where he’s limp behind his restraints.

“Can’t you wake him up?” Light tries, but Aizawa throws a hand to his forehead to gripe, “What’s the point? So he can thrash around and refuse us for another week?”

“Aizawa, I understand you’re tired, but we-”

“Tired? You think this is just tired?” he clips back. “Chief, this type of work could drive someone insane. Don’t you ever think about your family? We’ve barely left these headquarters in over a month.”

Souichirou’s lips purse, gazing toward the ground past his steepled hands.

The thought crunches Light’s chest up in a fist as well, but he remains stoic and staid, calm and commanding. A Yagami. L. “I think Aizawa has a point. You should all go home for a little while. At least while our suspect is sleeping.” The others blink weary up toward him. “Ryuzaki and I can handle it for now, go and get some rest.”

“Light, I don’t think I could do that,” his father says, but behind him, Mogi counters with, “...I could,” and the rest are lost in bobbing nods and little mumbles.

“Dad, you most of all need a break,” he asserts. “I know you’re the police chief, but you’re also a husband, and a father. Mom and Sayu need you just as much as this investigation does.”

His expression is hardened, though Light feels the certainty of his melting touch.

“If it’d make you feel better, Chief, I can stay back too,” Matsuda stands sharply to say, one hand lifting to a salute at the forehead. Souichirou lifts a brow.

“Matsuda, you should go-” Light begins to say, but is overridden by passion.

“I want to stay here with you and Ryuzaki,” he insists, more firm than has ever left him. “I don’t want to be dead weight on this team. I know I can do this.” The edge to him stays for an exhale, dissipating back to a sheepish little good boy smile to hold his nape and say, “Besides, my mom and grandmother have been so proud of me for working so hard, I don’t want to come home and make them think I’m slacking off.”

Light stares at him as though he were a horizon gone to melted gold. A moment, and it’s gone, and he’s nodding one firm, proud nod to Matsuda and saying, “Alright. The rest of you, go home and rest. We’ll call you as soon as anything new happens.”

In waves lifted from sea, they rise, one by one by one until they’ve all left their gratitude for Light and seen him off with luck. His father pauses just after he’s picked his coat off the hook by the door. They keep silent as they watch each other’s faces, both unchanging, both with that identical twist of integrity. Then, as if magnets suctioned forth, Souichirou paces forward to grasp his son in both arms, three seconds and a pat on the back before they are again two beings. Liquid feel all Light’s bones. He’s on the beach in Shimoda, splitting a vanilla Papico with his sister on a summer Sunday where there’s no work to be had by the newly appointed chief of the Japanese Police Force, so he’s sitting in a folding chair beside his wife, laughing when the wind blows in a harsh burst and she’s to grasp onto her sunhat before it flies free, watching his children chase each other along the shoreline, rapturous. Light breathes his eyelids opened again, and he says to his father, “Tell mom and Sayu I’ll be home soon. ...And Ryuk.”

Slow as any sunrise, Souichirou’s mouth accepts an upward curve, nodding it back straight to show himself out the exit door. Echo.

“...Wow,” makes him remember at all that he’s not alone. “I’ve never seen the chief be so...Dad-ish.”

Light glances to him, thinks it through on the curve of his mind until distraction’s good enough to enchant his attention; over a shoulder, they’re both taken, where from the corner hall has crept a shadow in fatigue, hunched forward, fingers scratching at the skin of his navel beneath his shirt.

“My team has abandoned me,” L mumbles after blinking about the empty space. He turns toward the front table, peering at Higuchi’s conked out body. Light watches him study that a while, all the way to lifting a finger to a button, lips on the extending mic. “Coffee, please.”

Light learns over the course of the time that follows in their salted silence, that Higuchi snores every so often in a _snurk_ and a gasp, then continues on in his repose, and on a new matter, that L can balance twelve sugar cubes in his cup before they begin to tremble.

Matsuda’s had a cheek in his hand for the past ten minutes, eyes blinking more and more slower and slower. It’s a painful thing, watching paint dry, but while they need not a team of eight to do the job, there’s no second available to leave a demon unsupervised. Together as a trio they’re able to keep the walls glued to each other. He sips his coffee. It’s got to be evening by now, with how the weather has eased to plinks along the windowsills, from what he can hear, and how his middle aches with emptiness so suddenly aware. His eyes shift just enough to see L in his peripheral gnawing on the corner of a sugar cube. Not eating. Chewing. Characteristic, Light thinks.

“Ryuzaki,” he murmurs, lifts his palm from his face to speak better clear. “Do you ever have real food?”

At the center, he becomes the focal point for their attentions. There’s a quiet moment before L sighs from his nose. “Your definition of _real_ can so easily differ from anyone else’s.”

“Hey, yeah,” Matsuda joins in. “I saw him eat spaghetti last week, and gyoza another night. Probably not hungry for dinner very much when you’re always stuffing your face with cake though, huh, Ryuzaki?”

If Light were of dim wit, he’d swear L’s turned away face was cast in flush. But only is it true that’s he’s twisted himself to face the task before them again, making food now out of his bottom lip.

The gnawing stops once Light decides to test, “How about a steak dinner? Something hearty like that. Vegetables, potatoes. An all American meal- I won’t even make you eat anything traditional.”

“You’re trying to distract me,” L murmurs, while Matsuda leans forward to laugh, “Light’s trying to ask you on a dinner date.”

“No, that’s not the case,” Light is _quick_ to dismiss, angling half a glare for Matsuda alone. Zero activity touches the screens. L holds his shins.

“I suppose it’s coming on dinner time now,” he thinks aloud, then looks back at Light. “You’re hungry, yes?”

Yes. By all means. Weeks of Watari’s high end meals, Mogi pitching in as often as he likes with the cooking, Misa dropping by with bentos for lunch, breakfast of anything that can have icing drizzled on it. Weeks of craving his mother’s cooking. And herein, he’s expected some platter of meats and rice, just like Watari knows he likes, set before he and Matsuda while L strips back a banana peel and calls it nutrition. Worse off, though, they’ve waited a hot ten minutes for three bags to set in front of them, L nodding to Watari’s bow as he slips back off to his own quarters.

Merely Light trips on blinking. To his right, Matsuda grasps the top of his bag to dig ravenously through it. “Ah man, I haven’t had fast food in forever. Good call, Ryuzaki.”

Crinkling sounds midsentence, and the last bit is of a burger stuffed mouth, _mmmm_ playing on afterward. Light glances there, ahead, beside, nose lifting just a touch in the air. Still, above the uncertainty, he’s focused higher on lengths of fingers reaching slowly out to pinch the paper bag open in front of him. There’s a tray of three drinks set in the midpoint of the table, not grappled for just yet- L’s attention stays only on the wrapper in his hands. It peels back almost cautiously between two fingers. Cautious, juxtaposed by the snatch of his teeth forward. L fills his mouth, eyes on the screen housing Higuchi, still chewing, kissing ketchup off the pad of his thumb while more coats around his lips.

Always sudden in his motions, L turns his head inward, asking with that mouthful still midchew, “You don’t like it?”

“Oh.” Light glances toward his untouched meal. “Well...I’ve never really had anything like this before.”

“Never had McDonald’s?” Matsuda gawks with a straw in his teeth. “Chief really never let you? Jeez…”

“It isn’t that. My mom is just a good cook.”

“Light’s too high class,” says L.

 _...You have a fucking limousine,_ thinks Light.

“No, no,” he tries to chortle. Something else lingers at his mind, yet it can’t be found so faultless, something he just doesn’t grasp. Rather, he does so instead in front of him, and the piece of chicken (...probably) in his hand is analyzed a moment before he accepts a bite. He’s hungry. He can’t be rude.

“People really eat this stuff, huh…”

Matsuda laughs while L reaches an arm ahead to claim a cup, and Light mimics to take the final drink and balks on the first sip, but of course. L couldn’t go a full meal without a _little_ something for him better. Light sets his milkshake down, tapping his nails to the table before going into another bite of meat.

If he’s honest, with this thinking time now, it’s stupid the way L has swallowed his question as a kind of challenge, just asked if he’s eaten real good food before so it’s been thought _oh, I’ll certainly show him_ and rushed head first into this. He’s almost wondering if L even likes the taste of his choice, though judging by the mess on his face and the starved dog way he’s gone into it, it’s likely he lives as _tired_ as to rely on a five hundred yen meal thrown at him through a window. It’s stupid of him. Stupid cute, if Light’s more time to think so condescending. That’s it.

There isn’t so much left of them from there, perched between each other all the three, not so much yet defined perfectly. Matsuda slouches, stomach warm and satiated, floating himself within the waves of sleep rather than just their criminal. Wrappers pile the table until a shadow comes to sweep them away, whip a napkin from his pocket and wipe it across a messy mouth (to which L writhes like a toddler til the elder man relents with a chuckling); they’re clean and tidy and clasped all kindly along, worn and torn, smothered by what’s to come ahead. It almost hurts him, Light tremors in feeling, hurts to clench himself upright hours on end and be the strength where it’s slacked. He glances left. L’s watching the screen. He glances right. Matsuda’s asleep.

His knuckles pad against his slumped shoulder. Matsuda gasps up into life to sit at attention for him. “Stay focused, I need to use the bathroom,” the most gentle voice touchable goes, and Matsuda nods with a _yes!_ and fulfills a swivel forward.

Nowhere else earns his glance as he slips freed from the retina burning glow. A sigh lilts with his push forth on the restroom door a hallway off. The mirror sings back to him the beat of his heart, and his forearms shiver to support his weight rested against the countertop. Brunet forms a halo round his visage when he hangs it. And breathes.

The water splashing against his face is a welcomed sensation, particular to that burn in his eyes, the pressured flush dusting his cheekbones. He rubs his palms along his nose, lips, allows his mouth to drown out in several rinses. There won’t be a time upcoming yet where he’ll choose the same dinner.

He isn’t positive what it is about this night, but his flesh is buzzing. He could murmur to himself in this mirror now a million different slaps in the face over getting it together, and he could have tremors run through the knuckles as he powders with a fresh hand towel, yet none’s that simple, none is the lay back to hook a hard glance to the reflection push out the door again, and none is so simple as his final breath of _get it together_ before he’s in the main room again, and Matsuda’s kept himself awake well enough considering he’s sat there alone watching the screens.

“He went…” Matsuda’s mouth purses in thought. He’d spotted Light’s puzzle piece return, prompting his finger to lift out toward the side doorway. “That way.”

Light nods, and he _could_ sit back in his spot and carry on with his own work, but if L is the L he knows (and God, is he ever), then he hasn’t just trailed off for some solitude. To the other, he nods, shifting to look that other direction, steels himself, trails along the path of clouds directing him to turn the knob of the lower rooftop door.

Where the weather had eased, it hasn’t let up so entirely- that’s the first thing Light notices as he steps out onto the asphalt. Rain splatters like a pulse against his shoulders, his hair, his forearm once he lifts it above the eyes to focus on the far off form several paces away. “Ryuzaki,” he says, attention collector. “What are you doing out here?”

It isn’t a moment before dulled eyes drag toward him. A hand lifts to L’s ear. Light repeats himself. A hand lifts. Light scoffs into a frown.

“I _said,”_ he pulls himself through the cascading pour to stop just beside the other, “What are you doing out here? You must be freezing.”

Drips leaks from the tips of dark matted hair, the light sew of his shirt suctioned to his body in such a way as to leave no contour unseen. Light can see the way he sucks a breath with his ribcage out pressed, expression without change, an animal heaving his inhales in the pouring, crystal rain. L’s head tips to one side.

“Yes,” he answers at last, and that’s all. Confusion battles frustration for a spot on Light’s tongue, but rather, he decides to glance toward where L’s vision hangs, absorbing only gray horizon amid the city streets. “I meant very honestly what I told you earlier, Light.”

That single gripping use of his name sets him tight. Now, here, the pique begins to simmer in a squeeze on one fist. “...I understand,” he breathes. “But, seriously, stop talking like that. You make it sound like you’re going to die right now.”

“It isn’t that,” L says. Rain hits the hard paved roof beneath their feet. “The reality is that I _could_ die at any moment. Lightning could strike me right now. I could lose my footing and slip off the roof. Someone could be aiming a sniper rifle at my forehead from two buildings away. Muda could get me.” He looks across the way to Light’s tense expression. “In the event that I am no longer around, I’d like a successor already prepared.”

Not meaning, not conscious, Light steps closer to him, shoulders broad with air. “And what if we die together?”

Beyond him, L’s face is a soft dampened pale. His chin lifts. He’s tired.

“In that case, it’d fall to one of the others I’ve trained to take my role. I haven’t decided between the two of them yet, though I’m not sure I plan to.” A finger curls to his lip, becomes his focal point, then drops to look toward Light again. Silence. The weather hushes in a deafening roar. “I chose the both of them because they showed no fear. There were no limitations to what they were willing to do to get the truth. The same reason I chose you.”

Light stands, still, melting. “...Just like you,” he notes, to which he then watches L contract with an inhale deep enough to straighten him as he turns. They face each other this way, the auburn evening gilding L’s collarbones.

“I tend to like people who I see myself in,” he admits, never once losing sight of Light’s softened features. Light himself, he tilts a shoulder just enough to be coy, smirking, “That seems pretty arrogant of you.”

“Yes,” L agrees, and there’s no time to make connection in the mind before it comes to them in the literal, neither bearing ownership to who’s first done what, but Light will swear certain that it’s been the hand reached to cup his jawline, stroke a thumb along his cheekbone, that’s made him freeze just a moment, forced next his arms to encircle the other’s waist. Another palm lifts to hold his face. Light’s hands raise higher upon ridged back muscles to drag them closer to one another. His eyes fall shut. He’s tired.

“This investigation is getting pointless,” mumbles so near to his throat he takes the heat of it.

Breeze flicks his bangs aside. Drips. Cold. He says back, “We’re almost there.”

That sits on the shell of L’s ears for so long as it lives, Light presumes, because there’s no such focus existent once L goes to work. Hands move from their hold to explore across Light’s features, a baby in the arms of its father gripping curious little fingers on the tip of his nose. A fingertip delineates the bridge, the areas surrounding his thin heartfelt eyes, pinching up the skin of his cheeks _just_ so, all until Light can’t help himself from breathing a laugh and moving his own finger up to trace the crackled skin of L’s bottom lip. It stretches into a taut smile by his own force, drops back flat when his hands both moves to roam the wet lengths of his hair, pruned himself to a delicate, lush simper once L too leaves his touch back to the lines of Light’s jaw; and when Light can no longer stand the sight of him, he taps his forehead to the other’s, and there they stand, resting, and Light is no sinner nor saint but somewhere right between, so he’d like to think he’s only leaning forward further still to kiss L’s face the way he does, never intending their mouths to touch, the way they do not, just the softest touch. The hands on his jawline tighten.

“Hey, you guys!” A car roams by ten stories down, splashing a puddle up against the curb on its way past. The rain hammers still. Pattering. Light has no fond clue how L could not have heard his own calls before, since he can now pick out Matsuda’s horrible terrible awful voice from the same distance as it shouts for them now. “Higuchi’s awake!”

“...And you left him unsupervised,” Light bites beneath his breath, once L’s already sprung away from him to follow the trail of the opened side door. Paces behind, he watches him meet Matsuda’s side- who yelps at the Saint Bernard shake of hair right beside him. He wipes the soak from his face as Light comes to pass him for the dark of the inside as well.

The middle monitor is balking with life once they return to claim their seats again. Behind Higuchi’s blindfold, there’s no indication of consciousness without lids to be seen apart, but they need it not once noting his shoulders struggling in their binds, teeth bared outward like a cornered tanuki. Knuckle to the mouth, L observes him, right back into it, nothing a disturbance at all to his daily routine. Light shifts in his seat, and forces his eyes forward.

“Kira-san,” taunts through the voice disguise of the transmitter. L keeps his lips close to the mic. “How did you sleep?”

Instantly, his legs begin to whip about. “Who the hell are you to ask me that? You think I sleep well tied to a chair in the middle of nowhere?! You’ll all regret mistreating me like this!”

“I feel we’ve been very fair,” says L. “Would you like something to eat?”

“To hell with it, you aren’t going to get me to confess anything by being hospitable, understand?!” He trashes enough for the chair to clip a fraction forward. “I’ll die of starvation before I accept anything else from you people!”

“Very well.” Light watches the two of them go back and forth and back. It’s a whirlwind, the way their criminal writhes among his pride and L within his own, aeons more dignified smart and sound. Still, too, is L nothing but august with a towel ruffling against his hair from the presence suddenly behind his chair. Light blinks back to his press on the microphone button. “I’ll have to let you go, then.”

Gasping corrals the two to his right. L’s finger falls away from the transmitter button, though they still from rooms away hear Higuchi’s stifled click of teeth sound through the speakers.

“You’re lying, right?” insists Matsuda. “There’s no way we can let him go now. He’s a suspected murderer!”

Thoughts serrate across the surface of Light’s brain. He stiffens, ducks his neck just a second to the feel of hands running a towel now through his own hair, though he’s back to basics in sitting right and allowing Watari his task a while. He exhales. L’s for certain got a method behind this insanity, a catch, a way out before anyone else is even yet in.

The button is pressed again. “The doors are open. You’re free to go anytime you like.”

In his seat, Higuchi finds as much posture as he can, nose in the air as if thinking, dubious. He tries again a tug at the wrists held behind his back. “You’re lying to me…” floats through the speakers. L leans forward, asks simply, “Are you sure?”, and releases the transmitter for a final time to sit back nicely in his spot.

Light watches the struggle brew up from there. Shoulders bob, then wriggle side, side, until the chair is full on rocking and his legs are flailing with noises of a one man brawl coughing from him.

“He’ll drive himself mad trying to get out of his restraints now,” catches Light’s attention to the left. A thumb coasts L’s lip. “So mad that he’ll be willing to do anything we ask.”

“That’s...a little unethical, don’t you think?” Matsuda scratches his jaw. “He’s a criminal, but he’s still a human being...”

They’re the three of them again alone in this room, Light remarks internally. That’s not suffocating enough for him to feel free. With a stark shut of his eyes, a stabilizing rotation, he lifts from his seat, hands on the table and blinks upon him. He straightens his neck upward.

“...I’m going to call the others back here,” he says. “It’s been hours now, I’m sure they’re probably up pacing around instead of actually resting. At least, I know that’s what my father’s doing.”

His heels clack away in echoes, clothing still bearing the damp linger of the rain outside til he’s full well to dried again by the time umbrellas pinch closed and coats toss on hooks, and all the sudden to all the sudden it’s full again enough to choked out pressure up into another lock of his will; he’s waited a bout of watching the thrash on the screens for the back door to be tapped upon, and Mogi’s the first to shuffle his shoes on the mat Watari’s laid down on his way inside. Ide follows, Ukita and Aizawa shortly behind until in comes the chief, worn beside either eye as he shakes the rain off his coat to hang up.

The hour is nearing the night’s midst. Souichirou wastes not a breath before he’s asked to be caught up on what he’s missed, the rest of task force nodding along behind him for the fill in. Matsuda, since risen to stand among his peers, murmurs something or other about mind torture, Light slicing away the nonplus to explain L’s latest plan. Immediately, the faces of the force darken, yet no one has a contradiction to toss. Exhaustion has pulled snugly the rope of acceptance.

Seats are taken around the room. Light swells in the exuberance come of late nights to claim his spot again, paused by a gruff voice unfamiliar lately to the headquarters, yet welcomed back, welcomed.

“Light,” Souichirou directs, “You should know, your mother is waiting up for you.”

That excitement to rush forth falters just enough, deflates a clench. “Waiting up? She thinks I’m coming home right now?”

His father rests in stern staid stone. Beneath it, though, a glimpse of softness. “I told her you would be,” he says, and does not let his son’s gawk deter him. “It’s your turn to get your rest, Light. Matsuda and Ryuzaki as well.”

“Heh, well I guess it won’t be so bad now that the case might actually be going somewhere,” Matsuda says, rubs his opposite shoulder, yawns into, “I can tell my grandmother we’ll have the answers in a day or two.”

“But that’s just it- we _will_ have the answers in a day or two, if Ryuzaki’s plan works out. I can’t just leave that close to the end of this all.”

“Light,” nudges from Souichirou again. “I say this as both your superior in this task force and your father. Go to bed.”

His authority cracks beneath his feet. On either hand, he’s got no longer any edge against it, but within either can he pick, pick, pick his mild way into compromise, breathing hot against a nod. “...I’ll go see Mom, like you said. But I’ll be back in an hour.”

Something spins behind the police chief’s eyes, yet he declines further opposition to grace his offer. “Alright,” he allows him, “She’ll be relieved to see you. She even said she’d make castella for you.”

To each other alone, sweet humor glints in the irises, captured away by all attention shifting to the corner off, where life has sprouted so sudden from silence. “Castella?”

The team glances along L and his crouched form, his first word spoken since their new entrance. Higuchi writhes his spine against the support of the chair. Light devotes his gaze to L again instead, where he’s in that spot, that perched little crouch, staring over his shoulder to the pair of Yagamis with constellations for eyes. Between each other again glance father and son, and between each other glance mother and son once the front door has been knocked upon and yanked open, caring never for the late hour nor the meager mist left coming down, nor the limousine parked in her driveway or the stranger slouched on her porch- at the very least, not until after she’s ceased clutching Light up in a hug and swaying him back, forth, just the mildest. Hands on his biceps, she’s smiling, lines of life crinkling in the corners of her eyes, stepped back enough now to spot a second visitor. Her smile leaks away- Light had feared it. It leaves, and her head shakes, and it returns in full chrysanthemum benevolence to usher, “You must be L-san. Come in, boys, are you hungry? I made you your favorite cake, Light.”

He sheds his cream colored pea coat to hang on the rack with the rest, the _smell_ of home permeating from Sayu’s winter jacket and his mother’s scarves. He slips his shoes off already afterwards of L, sockless on his living room carpet, the audacity of him to do so not at all bothering Light as he goes to follow them both. Sachiko is bobbling away questions for them, chatter, plainly, wishes to absorb all that’s been lost in the past months split. L keeps his hands in his pockets, nose in the air. Light only stops observing him once he’s drawn to glance downward to the pressure on his ankles. Very nearly, he smirks, crouching down to his haunches to stroke a hand down Ryuk’s back. The cat trills his gravelly sounds. His feet are found again to his mother’s voice beckoning from the kitchen.

There’s three plates set to the table by the time he finds his way in. Sachiko sits to one left side seat, L perched in one to the right with a fork stuffing his cheek. Light glances about the emptied chairs still, sliding the third serving of castella from the head of the table to the seat beside L.

“How is the investigation going?” his mother dives right into. “I was surprised when your father came home earlier, and then for him to say you’d be on your way soon, too- oh, I’m so happy to have you here, but I hope that doesn’t mean things are going badly over there.”

Across from her, they glance vaguely at each other, Light stealing the tip of the sand to nod himself forward. “Actually, we’re almost done with the investigation. Ryuzaki had a breakthrough earlier today- oh, ah, that’s his codename while we’re working. He’d prefer it if you called him that instead of L.”

“I don’t mind it,” he interjects. “Ryuzaki is growing tired on me. I’d rather the both of you call me by my true name. While we’re here, at least.”

He's watching. He's filtered on sleep top pond.

“Well,” breaks the silence that follows, where Light can only gaze at the side of L as he chews, swallows, chews, lives, and his mother’s reaching across the table to lay a hand atop her son’s knuckles. “I’m glad to hear things are going well, then. Let’s hope you can finish this up soon and let you both get some rest. And your father. Heaven knows he needs it.”

“Right,” Light sighs, though he’s smiling just a bit, for his mother’s sake alone. Fork tongs scrape to porcelain. The second two plates remain virgin. So sudden, before he’s to take anymore lightbulb pressure from his mother (who means so well, always), pattering sounds over head, and he hears a cough, and he hears a creaking little voice call for his mother up the stairs.

Toward the stairway, Sachiko looks with solicitude, tutting herself to a rise from her seat. “Oh, your sister’s been sick lately. Let me go check on her, I’ll be back down.”

Light nods her off. Her shadow crawls all the way to the second floor before he finds it a safe season to turn inward, inward, a twist where L has already rested himself to stare. Not for a moment does Light flinch away. It’s half lit in the kitchen, tile drinking it most whilst only the most vague honey pours over his shoulders. It’s late in the kitchen, tired and worn hands, with a pang in every last inch that throbs only in memory. The rain. The evening.

“Are you going to finish your cake?” mumbles L, a dull length of no wave, L Lawliet as he always so is, Light knows. His chest aches with adoration. If he must say.

The plate transfers places. L dips his fork into the center.

Beneath the table his legs are crossed, one foot tapping to music he’s never heard, and above it his elbow rests, palm the silver platter for his cheek to lay as he watches the only other in the whole wide room sit beside him. A breakthrough, they’re almost there- all a waveless ocean from here on out, he sips his lips upon. A breakthrough.

L takes a bite of cake.

Light smirks at him from aside.

The kitchen is half lit, and the the next time their skin should taste winter it’ll be white, black white all around, vanilla and hands interlocked, and they’ll be there.

“What’s the smile for?” pinches him from the potential slope deep into daydream. Light shakes himself awake, alive again, flush pink up arms and legs and life, life, life. He’s tempted, and it’s the only moment in a string of forever where this all will exist, where anything so similar will sit; a moment is one moment that never again twins itself, must be wrung of its fullest as it is, while the chance breathes.

They’re almost there, just a few more pushes, a day or two. All that he’s worked for. He’ll have it.

“...You,” Light says, and leans inward with his eyes shut soft.


End file.
